The Tick of Death

by Peter Lovesey

  ‘The darling gentlemen!’ said Devlin with feeling.

  ‘When shall we see them?’ asked Cribb, with all the enthusiasm at his command.

  ‘Tomorrow evening. They have convened a formal meeting of the Clan. It will give us the opportunity of admitting you to our ranks, Mr Sargent. That is essential if you are to join us in the climax of our work. I assume that you have no objection to taking a solemn oath to devote yourself to the cause of a free Ireland?’

  ‘I’ll swear to anything, miss, if I’m paid for it.’

  ‘That isn’t what our visitors will want to hear, Mr Sargent, but Patrick and I understand the conditions of our arrangement with you, and as my father is proposing you, there should be no difficulties. However, he is most desirous that you should make a good impression on them. Coming as they do, fresh from America, they will not have heard of Tom Malone’s passing, rest his soul.’

  ‘Amen,’ murmured Devlin, nodding his assent like a man at a prayer-meeting.

  ‘It will undoubtedly come as a shock to them. Their first inclination might be to cancel the project.’

  ‘The buggers!’ said Devlin.

  ‘But we shall then tell them of the more than adequate substitute we have found.’ She indicated Cribb with a wave of the hand. He returned a modest smile.

  ‘And that is the juncture,’ she continued, ‘at which Father has decided you will do something that will leave no doubt in their minds as to your eligibility for the Clan.’

  Cribb’s smile faded. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You will provide a demonstration of your bomb-making skills. You are to use the time between now and tomorrow evening in constructing two infernal machines. We shall detonate one of them in full view of our guests in the most dramatic circumstances. It will reinforce all the fine things Father will have to say about your usefulness to the Clan. Isn’t it a splendid plan?’

  Cribb took a fortifying sip of tea.

  Before he could respond, Rossanna went on, ‘The second machine, which must be identical to the first, will be required later on. You shall have all the materials you need. Tell me, how much dynamite would you say is necessary to destroy a building of moderate size—say the size of Patrick’s workshop in the garden?’

  Devlin was on his feet. ‘What the blazes—’

  ‘Don’t get so agitated, Patrick. I am merely providing Mr Sargent with an example. Well?’ She raised her eyebrows and looked in Cribb’s direction.

  He tapped his nose knowledgeably. ‘Hm. It’s a brick building if I remember. Solidly constructed. Fifteen pounds of the stuff would certainly do it, though, and you might manage with less. It depends very much on where you place your charge.’

  ‘We shall come to that in a few minutes. Finish your breakfast, Mr Sargent, and you may then escort me into the garden. There is something I must show you. This is just the morning to be outside, don’t you agree?’

  In five minutes, she was steering him determinedly into an area of the garden they had avoided in their previous walk, a wilder, more wooded part, where she had to lift her skirt to avoid entangling it in briars. Cribb picked up a stick, trimmed it and used it to beat away obstructions. When they had been going some hundred yards and the house behind them was out of sight, Rossanna gave a small cry of distress. ‘My skirt! It is all caught up on a beastly bramble, Mr Sargent.’

  He turned from his beating and went to her aid. It was difficult to account for the accident. He had been most conscientious in clearing every hazard from the footpath, even to the point of slashing the stems of those liable to spring back. For all his efforts, she was undeniably held captive at the side of the path. ‘You should have kept to the centre, Rossanna,’ he told her. ‘Now keep still. It’s not the skirt that’s caught, it’s the petticoat. My word, lace as delicate as this wasn’t made for promenading in the woods, you know. If you’ll just move your foot a fraction to the right, then—oh, my stars!’

  How it happened, he was not clear, because he was too occupied stooping to disentangle the lace from the bramble without damage. He was briefly aware of a quivering movement from Rossanna. She wobbled, changed her footing, reached out with her arms and then lost balance altogether, gently subsiding into the fronds of young bracken behind her. It would have been passably discreet if one of her hands had not caught Cribb’s shoulder and toppled him over in the same direction. His fall, too, was gentle. He found himself immersed in a sea of lace and white linen, his right hand in contact with a stockinged knee and the side of his face pressed against an area it did not take a C.I.D. training to identify as her bosom. In trying to extricate himself, he inadvertently brushed his left hand across a surface of smooth, warm flesh terminated by what could only be a garter.

  ‘Then you did come to my room last night!’ exclaimed Rossanna, without displaying much concern at her predicament. ‘I was sure I heard you move across the floorboards on your way back to bed. No wonder Father was so restless!’

  ‘I’m not sure what this has got to do with it,’ said Cribb, lifting his head, but refraining from any further movement of the hands.

  ‘I should have thought it was obvious,’ said Rossanna, giggling. ‘I hope your bomb-making is more restrained than your love-making, Mr Sargent, or we shall all be blown up when you get to work with the dynamite this afternoon. Much as I am flattered by such a display of passion, I must plead to be released on this occasion. There is so much to be done before the emissaries arrive tomorrow, and Father relies on me absolutely.’ She lifted her head and pertly kissed the tip of his nose. ‘Perhaps in a day or two, when the work has been completed . . . Now, if you will kindly put down my skirt and help me to my feet, we might resume our walk.’

  The whole thing had happened so precipitately and without any initiative on his part—whatever she suggested to the contrary—that he felt quite weak at the knees when he stood up. If, as he suspected, she had engineered it all, then she was a remarkable young woman, a conclusion he had reached soon after meeting her, without realising how remarkable. But why should she have arranged such an accident? Was it to satisfy herself that he had really been on an amorous mission the night before? She had certainly reacted emphatically after the accidental arrival of his hand upon her thigh. Accidental? Fortuitous, more like. She had taken it as the signal of a resumption of passion. It was all she had wanted to know.

  Satisfactory as the outcome was, he still felt that his reputation as an adventurer was a little tarnished by the incident. He reflected, as he obligingly removed a thistle from the back of Rossanna’s skirt, that a professional would not have behaved in quite the same way. And he would have struck a short, sharp blow in that area to rekindle her respect for the adventuring profession if she had not been wearing a bustle.

  As it was, they continued their journey along the path for another hundred yards or so, when they came to a small lake. On the far side was a tall red-brick tower in the gothic style, crenellated at the top. It was accessible from the bank on one side, but supported in the water by three arches.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Cribb.

  ‘A folly, Mr Sargent.’

  ‘Folly?’

  ‘A useless building erected at the whim of a landed gentleman. Some call them gazebos. This one is your target for destruction.’

  ‘Good Lord! The owner won’t take kindly to that, will he?’

  ‘The owner is an Irishman. He will be told that his folly was sacrificed to the cause. I am sure you must have destroyed scores of buildings more serviceable to mankind than this monstrosity.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Cribb, remembering himself. ‘But won’t the noise attract unwanted attention from people hereabouts?’

  ‘It is most unlikely. We are quite isolated here. If anyone heard a distant explosion they would assume it came from the cement workings at Stone. Blast the gazebo out of existence, Mr Sargent. Your reputation depends upon it.’

  CHAPTER

  11

  THE REST OF THAT day and the n
ext was a period of intense activity in the house by the river. The impending arrival of the emissaries from the Revolutionary Directory had galvanised everyone. Formal meals were abandoned. Nourishment was snatched at irregular intervals. What consultations there were took place in corridors and on staircases, and were confined to essential business.

  Cribb, not least, needed every minute he could get at his work. Three weeks at Woolwich had given him a useful grounding in explosives, enough to pass muster among the dynamiters, but no one at the Arsenal had envisaged him making infernal machines. He had to make them now, or confess he was an impostor. To complicate matters, Rossanna had insisted that the gazebo be destroyed from underneath, by a charge placed in a watertight metal box at the base of one of the brick supports. He had tested the depth of the water there with a stone and line and found it to be over nine feet. The pressure of the water at that depth would assuredly curb the destructive power of the dynamite; how much, he could not begin to assess.

  There was no shortage of bomb components. Devlin took him to an out-house beside the kitchen-garden and unlocked the door to a veritable arsenal. As well as the cases of dynamite from Hole Haven, there was at least a hundredweight of Atlas Powder stored there. ‘I shall need some detonators,’ said Cribb, trying not to seem staggered at the force represented in the store. ‘You can’t make bombs without detonators.’

  ‘We keep them elsewhere,’ said Devlin, giving him a long look. ‘I’m not the authority on explosives here, but I’m told you don’t store detonators with dynamite.’

  ‘Oh, quite right,’ Cribb airily conceded. ‘Where are they, then?’

  ‘In the house. We keep them in the room under yours.’

  It was said in the matter-of-fact manner that could not possibly be taken for anything but literal truth. This was shortly borne out, when the two men entered the room in question. The first thing to take Cribb’s eyes was the mantelpiece. Anyone unfamiliar with the manufacture of infernal machines might have wondered at the lengths to which some people go to bestir themselves in the morning, for at least a dozen alarm clocks were crowded on the shelf. Cribb crossed the room and picked one up. ‘Benson of Ludgate Hill, eh? Nothing less than the best.’

  ‘McGee’s orders,’ explained Devlin. ‘He blames his accident on a faulty clock. The detonators are over here, in the tallboy.’ With conspicuous care, he pulled open a drawer. Three rows of test tubes lay on a bed of cotton-wool, each one held fast by a twist of wire. ‘Malone did all this. I don’t know what the stuff inside is.’

  ‘It must be a fulminate of some kind,’ said Cribb. ‘Probably mercury. What’s in the other drawers?’

  Devlin opened one to see. ‘It looks like a rope to me.’

  Cribb turned a piece over in his hand. ‘Slow-match. This is what I’d use to make a bomb in the normal way. It burns a yard in eight hours, compared with the yard a minute of a conventional fuse. Unfortunately, you can’t burn a slow-acting fuse in an air-tight box, so I’m restricted to a clock-timed detonation. Do we have guns?’

  Devlin opened the other drawer.

  ‘Cartridge-firing pistols,’ said Cribb, glancing inside. ‘You can see why so many of the bombs deposited about London never go off. There’s too many possibilities of faults in the mechanism. If there isn’t something wrong with the alarm-clock or the connexion with the trigger, there’s still the possibility of the hammer not striking the cap truly, and missing fire. It goes against all my bomb-making principles to make a machine as liable to defects as that and then drop it into nine feet of water and expect it to detonate perfectly. It’s too much to expect.’

  ‘My heart bleeds for you,’ said Devlin, with a grin that suggested otherwise. ‘Those are the water-tight boxes beside the wardrobe. I think you’d better start work at once. The Clan doesn’t look kindly on failures.’ With that, he left, presumably to check that his own work was in order.

  Cribb, in sole occupation of the room, and with the key to the dynamite-store in his pocket, allowed himself a moment’s reflection. He had secured a position of trust in the dynamite party. With the help of a gun from the drawer, he was perfectly capable of surprising Devlin and taking him in charge. Rossanna and McGee would be even less trouble. They could all take the place of Thackeray in the wood-store until police reinforcements arrived.

  What held him back was the promise of something better: the exposure and defeat of McGee’s plan. Premature arrests would allow the Clan to assign the mission—whatever it was—to another group. No, there was always an optimum moment to swoop, and it was not yet.

  The one thing gnawing at his conscience was the helplessness of Thackeray. If the torturing continued, he would certainly intervene. There was more than a possibility, though, that Devlin and Rossanna were now too occupied preparing for the visitors to expend more time trying to extract information from their stubborn prisoner.

  Sensible as all this seemed, it left him with the task of building two infernal machines in little more than twenty-four hours. Why had Rossanna insisted upon two? Was one to be kept in reserve in case the first failed? He doubted it. The object of the demonstration was to make a strong and instantaneous impression on the emissaries from America. To admit that the first bomb had not exploded—and there would be a short delay while the second was rowed out and lowered into position in hope of more success—was unlikely to win anyone’s confidence.

  Surely it was likelier that the second bomb was wanted for some other target, perhaps in fulfilment of what Rossanna had termed ‘the ultimate object of all our work’. If so, he had the opportunity of foiling the scheme by building one incapable of detonation. Marvellously straightforward—if only Rossanna had not insisted that her father would inspect both boxes when their contents were ready, and select the one to be used for the demonstration. Cribb’s credibility depended on the success of the explosion by the lake.

  The rest of that day and well into the afternoon of the next was one of the most exacting and intensive periods of work he had ever set himself. As well as the dangerous task of assembling the bombs and making the infinitesimal adjustments that would decree success or failure, he had much to do at the lakeside, surveying the gazebo, rowing around its three sides and under the arched supports, calculating and preparing. Failure to destroy the building would be catastrophic, an admission of incompetence. In the merciless canon of the dynamite conspiracy, it warranted death.

  At four o’clock he asked Devlin to inform Rossanna that the machines were ready. She came out to the lawn where, in the interests of safety, he had arranged the squat, black boxes.

  ‘So here they are like two picnic-boxes!’ she said. ‘How much cold turkey did you put inside, Mr Sargent?’

  ‘About twenty-five pounds in each, if I understand your meaning correct, Rossanna. I’m allowing for some resistance, you see.’

  ‘It sounds a lot to me, but I’m sure you’re the expert. Lift the lids, please, and show me the insides. Ah, how very neat! And both clocks ticking merrily away and keeping excellent time.’

  ‘Nothing will be activated until the alarms are set,’ said Cribb. ‘But I don’t advise anyone to touch the parts. It only wants the slightest pressure on a trigger . . .’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Rossanna. ‘Well, I shall save my congratulations for later. The visitors will be here at six o’clock. Father has decided that the destruction of the folly will take place exactly two hours after that. He wants you to remain out of sight until the smoke has cleared. Then you will appear, like Mephistopheles.’

  ‘I hope it impresses ’em,’ said Cribb with total sincerity. ‘What are their names?’

  ‘Mr Carse and Mr Millar. I have not met them myself. Father knows them, though. They are patriots like the rest of us, but they have the reputation of being hard-headed men. Now, gentlemen, if you would be good enough to go to the kitchen I think there is some ale there for you. While you are gone, I shall bring Father out to inspect the machines. He will wish to see them alone. Do not b
e concerned, Mr Sargent. I shall insist that he touches nothing. If you return in half an hour, I shall tell you which box is to be used tonight and you can activate the mechanism. Then we shall seal it, and you, Patrick, can help Mr Sargent convey it to the lake and deposit it as he directs.’

  THE FIRST SIGN of the approach of spectators at the lakeside that evening was a flash of pale yellow through the trees, the shawl Rossanna was wearing, caught by the low-angled rays of the sun. They were using a more even path than the one she had led Cribb along on his first visit to the gazebo, probably because McGee was of the party. There were three bowler-hatted figures walking behind the chair.

  Cribb picked up the field-glasses he had borrowed from the house, and looked for Carse and Millar. One of the bowlers was Devlin’s, so he moved quickly on to the next. It was worn by a thick-set, grey-bearded man with florid skin and bulbous features. He was talking as he walked, using his clenched right fist to emphasise points.

  Cribb shifted the focus to the second newcomer, who was speaking to no one, seeming content to stay remote from the rest of the party. He stared fixedly ahead through thick, pebble-glass spectacles with wire frames. His height was not much over five feet and he had compensated for this by cultivating a large black moustache, bow-shaped so that the ends reached almost to the line of his jaw. For all the forceful gestures of the big man, this one conveyed more menace.

  They stopped at the waterside, some eighty yards from the gazebo on the other side of the lake. It was fully two hours since Cribb and Devlin had lowered the box by ropes from the rowing-boat into the water. They had lodged it as closely as possible to the base of one of the arched supports. It had seemed to come to rest gently. Nothing inside the box should have been disturbed. They had not remained long in the vicinity after lowering the bomb, even so.