Death and the Dreadnought

by Robert Wilton

  ‘You were going to tell me all about it.’

  I looked up at her. ‘I was?’ She was wearing a second dressing gown. It suited her better than mine; more conventional than her evening rig, but she still looked very fetching.

  ‘Unless you want me to believe the version in the Chronicle.’

  I nodded. ‘Alright. But I refuse to hog the bed any further.’ I swung upright with a groan, and made for the nearest chair. It only took me about five minutes to cover the ground. From the other chair she picked up what I’d thought was a cushion, but now turned out to be an enormous ginger cat. She sat, draped her legs over the arm of the chair, and settled the cat in her lap.

  I took a breath. ‘Last – No, two nights ago, I played cards with a man called Sinclair. Senior man in the Thames Ironworks shipbuilding outfit. They’re building one of the new Dreadnoughts. An acquaintance; not a bad chap. He was… I’d not thought of this before – he was rather distracted. Lost pretty heavily, which I’d assumed was my brilliance at Baccarat, but might have been something else. He cornered me afterwards, said he had something frightfully important to discuss, and I had to meet him at his shipyard. When I got there I found him dead – murdered. The police arrived at that point, put two and two together and locked me up. I got out… yesterday morning. When I got home yesterday afternoon, there was a man in my rooms who wanted to fake my suicide. There was a struggle. He came off worse. I was trying to keep my head down at the Ironmonger Row baths, but a couple of chaps there tried to kill me. I escaped and – and ran for the nearest skylight.’

  She was considering all of this, with a slight frown. She stroked the cat, and watched it purr. Then she looked up at me again. ‘On the whole,’ she said, ‘I think I prefer the Chronicle’s version.’

  ‘So do I,’ I said. ‘At least in the Chronicle I sound like I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘And what are you doing?’

  ‘I'm eating broth.’ I did so, until I'd finished the pot. Annabella Bliss sat in silence, stroking the enormous cat, and it was as wise and generous a response as when she’d let me drop out of the night without screaming the place down or fetching the peelers.

  ‘There's something wrong at the yard, or something wrong with the company that he could only prove at the yard.’ I put the pan down on the floorboards. ‘So I’m investigating the yard and I'm investigating the company.’

  ‘Sounds clear enough.’

  ‘Doesn't it? Perhaps I do know what I'm doing, after all.’

  The cat yawned mightily. Its owner looked no more impressed. ‘Why you, though? Why did this man Sinclair ask you?'

  I started to say something hilarious, and then stopped. It was rather a good point. ‘That’s what’s worrying, isn’t it? I was probably the least reputable man within half a mile of St James’s.’ I thought a bit. ‘Perhaps that's the answer. My only virtue is my vice – that I’ve knocked around a bit. For some reason, he needed someone disreputable.’

  ‘Nice to be wanted.’

  ‘Mm.’ I drifted into thought again, and looked around the room, its dinginess and its bursts of colour. 'I’ve got it,’ I said. ‘You’re an actress.’

  She smiled. ‘I would like to pretend so. Actually, I’m a singer. And a dancer if you’re not too choosy. In the music hall; the burlesque.’

  ‘Right. Hence the playbills, and the outfit.’ She nodded. ‘And hence the name. How did you get it?’

  ‘From my father,’ she said rather stiffly. She nodded to the table, where there was a formal photo of an elderly chap dressed up as a vicar.

  ‘He was an actor too, was he?’

  Now she looked plain cross. ‘He was a vicar.’

  I gave up. ‘I need some way into those company offices. And I need to get into that shipyard.’

  ‘Wearing a girl's dressing gown?’

  16.

  When he’d told me which of his Thames Ironworks Company colleagues to talk to, Hugh Stackhouse had said that yard manager MacNeice was unmissable.

  He’d not been wrong. Patrick MacNeice was enormous. You couldn’t have missed him with a harpoon. More aptly, you couldn’t have missed him with a naval cannon.

  A naval cannon would have had the advantage of keeping a goodly distance between you and him. And it might have had a chance of doing some damage. Nothing less seemed likely to bother him.

  A pistol against him would seem merely ridiculous. A tiny toy against such a vast body; a feeble thing against his bulk.

  I know this, because it was very much preoccupying me as I stood in front of him, in his office, with my Webley pointing at his stomach.

  Quinn had retrieved it and some of the money from Dobbs’s, and left them in a package behind the bar of a pub on the Strand whose landlord was a pal of his. I was going carefully. Annabella Bliss had collected the package from the pub. She’d also passed on my instructions for Quinn to find out anything he could about Sinclair’s friend Samuel Greenberg and his Commercial Confounded Conspiracy outfit.

  She was helping me. Something had convinced her: the ridiculousness of my story; the inherent credibility of my bearing even when covered in iodine paste and a Chinese-style lady’s dressing gown; her dear old father’s infallible test of innocence.

  I thought I was innocent, of course; but I recognize that it couldn’t have seemed very likely.

  Miss Bliss had ransacked the costume room of Jolly’s Theatre, to supplement the somewhat limited wardrobe she could offer me from her own collection.

  Thus it was in the rough duds of an off-duty sailor that I had made my second approach to the Thames Ironworks Company Shipyard.

  That was part one of my plan to avoid being picked up by any of the various groups after my blood: not to be noticeable.

  Part two was simpler still: not to be noticed at all. Today was the next phase in the great labour agitation of that autumn: a march through London’s East End, and a rally in the very yard where the latest war machine of the capitalist powers was being brought into its monstrous existence. (Not my own wording: I got it from a chap shouting beside me.) I would enter the Thames Ironworks Company yard among thousands of men dressed similarly to me.

  Probably a healthy reminder to me of the positive power of the mob. But I wasn’t feeling it. The necessary and tedious camaraderie of school and the army aside, I’ve never been much of a chap for crowds. I tend to pick and choose my company, and if he’s a mile or more away that’s fine by me. Now I was marching in a great throng of men, shoulders knocking between shoulders, a bobbing sea of heads in front of me and all around, the stamping of innumerable boots a continuous rumble underneath the banter, and the shouts, and the chants and the occasional song. It was a roaring, seething beast, this march, and I was bunched up in the middle of it.

  The outfit wasn’t helping. It wasn’t, I should say, Bliss’s first choice. She’d had a couple of attempts at putting me in something that looked fresh from the Jolly’s Theatre’s most recent Gilbert & Sullivan performance. And there’d been a rather frosty exchange when I resisted an eye-patch. But even though I didn’t resemble Long John Silver or a French yachtsman on a spree, I still felt out of place.

  I tried to match the rhythm and posture of the men around me. The lope. The slouch. We rumbled on along Commercial Road.

  I restricted myself to grunts if anyone tried to talk to me: I wasn’t going to fool around with proletarian accents, and an impression of grumpiness was the best deterrent against chat and questions.

  The last time I’d bumped into this crowd I’d immediately got into a fight with one of them. The way my luck was going, that one man in thousands was probably tramping right behind me.

  I didn’t turn round. Even if that one didn’t spot me as me, anyone might spot me as a fraud. And if they did that, they’d think I was a police spy. They’d probably kick me around a little, and then leave me for the police to pick up. Neither was attractive.

  We rumbled on. Over the Limehouse Cut, trying to not to breathe too
deeply. East India Dock Road.

  This morning’s Daily Sketch had printed a photograph of me. An old and not particularly good image made during one of my previous appearances in the vulgar eye – a rather tiresome business, touching a lady’s honour, that had blown up at a house party in Wiltshire – but good enough. Any one of these thousands of men might have read the Chronicle or the Sketch or presumably various others, and be able to spot me for the man who’d murdered their boss and ‘caused a disturbance’ during their march the previous day.

  This was an angry crowd.

  I’ve known the common Englishman on the parade square, and had to overcome his truculence and laziness. I’d never known anything like this. Organized labour had always been a phrase in The Times, nothing more; a concept intermittently troublesome but useful enough if the likes of David Sinclair and Hugh Stackhouse did their jobs right. Now I was among them, man after man after man, each physical and big and unhappy and bellowing his frustrations with the whole of society.

  My little difficulty with the police seemed momentarily rather trivial.

  Cotton Street. As if prompted by my thought, the chap next to me suddenly opened his slab of a jaw wide and roared ‘PAY FAIR OR PAY THE PRICE!’, and everyone around us picked up the words, and my ears filled with it like an explosion, and a fraction too late I tried to gasp out something that sounded similar.

  In Poplar High Street I pretended to have pulled a muscle in my leg, and eased my way to the edge of the crowd, and slowed. I watched them file past me for a full minute, so many bodies and so many faces and so much unhappiness. I fell in with the malingerers at the back, and followed the column as it weaved through between the warehouses and through the great gates into the Thames Ironworks Company yard.

  I slipped further back, and to the side, and away into shadow.

  I took a moment to check where I was, relative to the direction of the mob and the layout of the yard.

  The hesitation was unwise. Immediately my mind jumped back three nights, to the last time when I’d been on this exact spot, coming to meet Sinclair. The echo was uncomfortable. That moment, so recent but now the other side of an irreversible change, was the last moment when I could have turned around and headed back to the West End and enjoyed a life in which none of this nonsense had happened.

  Instead, I’d walked on. I walked on now.

  The yard offices were much easier to spot in daylight. They were a two-storey brick block running along the edge of the yard where it followed the road outside. The first floor offices were reached by an external stair and a walkway-balcony arrangement that gave a view across the great expanse of the yard.

  The stair and the walkway had brought me to the yard manager’s office: middle of the upper tier, neatly-painted sign, and big windows so he could look out on his empire. I hadn’t hesitated, and I hadn’t knocked. I was in and the door was closed behind me and my pistol was out and pointing at MacNeice before he’d properly focused on me.

  Even sitting down, behind his desk, he was vast. Solid, not fat: a great bear of a man, across shoulders and around chest. No neck, to speak of, and then an open outdoor face and black curly hair.

  He’d focused on the pistol now.

  It hadn’t seemed to impress him. I glanced down at it, to check that I wasn’t holding it backwards.

  He looked up at me.

  ‘If you’re after a job,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to do better than that.’

  The name hadn’t misled. Patrick MacNeice spoke with the broadest Irish accent, a rumble that sounded like it was bubbling up with difficulty from the Thames.

  ‘I’m not looking for a job. There; I’m doing better already.’

  ‘You’re not so daft you’d think there's money here surely?’ He was considering me, head to foot. ‘And you’d be a pretty fancy stick-up man to come armed with a Webley.’ He smiled grimly. ‘So you’re one of the angry intellectuals from out there, are you? Come to strike a blow for the workers of the world by plugging one dumb Irishman.' He stood, slowly. ‘Come along then, little man. Let’s see if you've the potatoes for it.’

  He'd risen with a gravity befitting his planet-sized appearance. I’m taller than most, but he’d half a foot more on me. And built like a ship’s boiler.

  And still the hard fatalist’s smile, waiting for the shot. I’d have liked him considerably, if he wasn't making things so difficult.

  ‘That’s most impressive,’ I said. ‘Now sit down again. We’re going to look ridiculous doing all this standing up.’ I pulled another chair forwards, and sat down opposite him, and waited.

  That made him more uncertain, which was a step in the right direction.

  As he sat, he was examining me more carefully. Now he nodded. ‘Gotcha,’ he said. ‘You’re Delamere. Feller who killed poor Mr Sinclair. And now you’ve come for me.’ He pulled his shoulders back. So steady. ‘Picture in the newspaper doesn’t do you justice.’

  ‘Nothing does,’ I said. ‘Yes. I’m Harry Delamere. Come to continue my campaign of mayhem against the men of the Thames Ironworks Company.’

  I considered the revolver, and considered the man sitting opposite.

  I laid the revolver down on his desk. Nearer me than him, and pointing in the right direction.

  ‘Or,’ I went on, ‘not.’

  He looked at the Webley. Up at me again. And back down at the revolver.

  One of the finest sleight-of-hand merchants I ever met was a monstrously obese Turk in Smyrna; needed two boys to pull him up from his divan, but could have the watch out of your waistcoat while he was asking you the time. Big men aren’t necessarily slow men.

  ‘MacNeice, I’d be obliged if you didn’t try anything foolish now, you hear?’ He considered this with the amusement it warranted. Nothing this man did would ever be foolish. ‘I hold the unfashionable opinion that I’m not the desperate maniac that the papers present. But believe me that I am now desperate enough to do almost anything to stay out of the hands of the police and the other people who are hunting me. Make a grab for the pistol, and I’ll make a grab for it. I’d rather not kill you, but I’d cheerfully take wounding you if it left me free to finish what I’ve started.’

  ‘A sporting chance, is it?’

  ‘Bullet’d probably bounce off you, anyway.’

  Very slowly, he brought his two shovel-like hands together, and folded them in front of him on the desk – a foot or so from the Webley – and smiled.

  Beyond his hands I noticed his watch-chain. I looked up at him again.

  ‘Outdoor complexion. Military fob on your chain. You’d have made… what? Colour-Sergeant at least. Royal Engineers was it?’

  ‘Artillery. Battery Sergeant-Major.’

  I nodded. The only two arms of the British Army that require any brain – scientific, technical brain – are the Engineers and the Artillery. Building stuff and blowing it up again: both require intelligence. Certainly compared to what the rest of us were doing: digging holes, jumping into holes, jumping out of holes, running towards a lot of chaps trying to kill us, and – about the smartest thing we did – running away again. The only truly clever officers I’d met during my service – cleverness beyond that necessary for a superficially witty remark in Latin, anyway – were engineers and gunners.

  MacNeice would have done twenty years. He’d risen from powder monkey to battlefield god, the embodiment of fear and justice to the soldiers under him, and an utterly dependable source of reassurance and authority for the officers notionally above him – who, if they’d any sense, left most of the command to those like him. A man used to calculating powder charges and elevations in his head while a squad of Boer horsemen charged at him with rifles blazing; no wonder I and my pop-gun didn’t seem to shake him.

  ‘Well, Mr MacNeice, here we are and ain’t it charming?’ Still the cold smile. ‘I’m in a rush and you ain’t, so allow me to short-cut your thinking. I’m hunted by the police, and by some other fellows who I don’t know but seem to
know me and not to be pleased about it. And one or two of the men out there’ – I nodded back out towards the yard – ‘don’t like me either, I suspect. So you’ve no obligation to try anything desperate: my chances of staying alive until the police get around to arresting me are slim in any case.’

  He considered this. He nodded.

  ‘It’s possible that I’m a homicidal madman, lulling you into your ease and waiting for the right moment to plug you; in which case we’ll wait and see if the gunner eye has lost any of its sharpness.’ He nodded again. This time with an appetite that I didn’t like.

  ‘Or I’m not. In which case I’m not going to try to shoot you, and I’m just going to ask you some questions, and you can decide whether and what you answer and I can’t do much about it. Fair enough?’

  From his furled fists, one finger emerged and pointed at me, cannon-like. ‘Delamere,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. I thought we’d covered that.’

  ‘Knew I’d heard the name before. You were in the Cape too. Brigade of Guards. Battle of Modder River, and so forth.’

  ‘Happy days,’ I said. It was no surprise; the professional grape-vine among the senior non-commissioned officers of the British Army is one of the most powerful going. As trade unions went, the mob outside had nothing on them. ‘What possible reason could Sinclair have had for coming to the yard here?’

  ‘Normal run of things, nothing. His business with the contracts and the legality of things, that was all in the head office on Holborn. He might choose to come and check up on whether a delivery was right, but he didn’t need to; I’ve fellows here for that. He might choose to call on me for a chat, rather than summon me to Holborn; but more often I was there. He paid the occasional visit just for the sake of it. Show the face, if you know what I mean.’ He caught my eye, and smiled hard. ‘Officer’s tour of the trench, right sir?’