Death and the Dreadnought

by Robert Wilton

  ‘Rather a bad business, sir,’ I said too loudly. ‘Looks like a couple of poachers. Some kind of accident – or perhaps an argument between them. They’re both dead, I’m afraid.’

  Aysgarth looked blankly at me. Either he knew he’d be hopeless trying to act emotion, or his mind was no longer registering the chaos I had raised on his land. He turned away and beckoned to his head gamekeeper.

  While the head gamekeeper was digging up a couple of lads to come with us – they’d have been enjoying a pint of ale in the kitchen, far from the spread of pies and wines on the lawn – I found that the old man had drifted up behind me.

  He murmured: ‘You all right, Delamere?’

  ‘Still alive, anyway.’

  ‘Good show. And, er, the scene of… of whatever has just happened?’

  ‘Will support the story I have told.’

  The ground where the two bodies now lay, the presence of some tricky fallen branches at the edge of the gully, was consistent with one or both of my two assassins having stumbled. Some of their fancier clothes and kit had been buried. Both now had shotgun wounds. Grim old business, international diplomacy.

  ‘Good show. Looks like you belong in this game after all.’

  ‘But they don’t!’ I’d turned on him, and was hissing my irritation. ‘These people are the closest I have to family, and they don’t belong in it.’

  Wisely, he didn’t try to say anything. He just rested his hand on my shoulder a moment, and drifted away again.

  I was gone another half hour, leading the gamekeeper and his lads to the scene and offering some fatuous upper-class gestures of help as they got on with the clearing up.

  When I got back, the last of the guests had gathered from the house and the woods for their lunch. As I came near, Aysgarth was talking to a couple of the foreigners.

  ‘Had rather an unfortunate incident out in the woods this morning. Fatal, I’m afraid.’ Von Hahn was one of the foreigners. I saw his expression of polite concern. ‘Couple of poachers got tangled up with each other somehow; they’re both dead.’

  Von Hahn frowned, in confusion. And that was the moment when I came into his vision, somewhere behind Aysgarth’s shoulder.

  For one instant Von Hahn’s eyes went wide. Then as quickly his self-control took over again, and he was nodding bland concern at Aysgarth, and no-one who hadn’t happened to be looking at him at that very instant would have noticed a thing.

  You knew.

  You bastard, you knew what was supposed to happen.

  You were expecting one unfortunate accident out in the woods. But you weren’t expecting two, and you certainly weren’t expecting Harry Delamere to come out of the bushes in one piece.

  Bliss had been right. The German government had declared war on the Delameres.

  And I still couldn’t prove any of it.

  The morning’s drama had left me damned hungry. I ploughed through more than my share of veal pie. At one point, lurking over the sandwiches, I saw Victoria opposite me.

  She was looking a little pale. We watched each other for a moment. We didn’t say anything. She knew what I felt, and I knew what she felt, and it was no damn use saying any of it. It never was.

  I was reaching for an unwise second glass of wine when I saw the old man again, and saw the faintest nod of his head to beckon me.

  He was standing with one of the Foreign Office chaps, and Hugh Stackhouse. Stackhouse was looking hot and bothered. ‘Someone’s been in my room!’ he said, trying to keep his voice down but failing to hide his concern. ‘Been through my papers.’

  I thought about Hertenstein. He could have drifted into the house, between most of the party leaving and the time he’d bumped into me in the woods.

  The old man said: ‘Anything taken?’

  Stackhouse nodded, looking grim. ‘The plans of Glasgow docks, where the Colossus is fitting out.’

  50.

  The Council of War took place the next morning, in Birmingham’s New Street Station. It’s a grand location to discuss the safety of the Empire: a vast glass canopy soaring over the tracks, all one single span without columns, held together by a jungle of intricate ironwork far above. There was a monstrous bustle of steam and noise and people around us, as the engines coughed and hissed to a stop and belched out smoke, and wheezed into movement again ahead of their trains of ornate carriages going to north and south, and every class of humanity flowed along the platforms under the heavy elegance of the lamps.

  We were eight: the old man, one of the Foreign Office chaps, Sir Percy Savary himself up from London, Stackhouse and another man from the Thames Ironworks Company, Inspector Bunce and his Assistant Commissioner, and me. We had the waiting room on Platform 1 to ourselves. A policeman on each door saw to that.

  The business with Stackhouse’s papers had rattled the Government properly. Hence Savary’s presence. They’d been more than uncomfortable that the next stop on the international revolutionary pilgrimage just happened to be the city where the newest Dreadnought was getting ready. Now there was a clear indication that something was planned right in Glasgow docks. The threat was clear and direct.

  I’d had a bit of trouble with the Foreign Office man, who’d refused to consider that the German government might be involved. I’d started to say something undiplomatic about wanting to see him running for his life through the undergrowth, but the old man had interrupted and suggested that given various indications during recent days it would be judicious to have the possibility of German involvement in mind until we could clearly rule it out. Everyone had politely accepted, and I’d not had to admit that I’d been involved in the deaths of two more foreigners. Bunce was keeping quiet in the presence of his superior, but from his scowl I could see that he was as sceptical about my German spies as he was about everything else I’d ever said to him.

  ‘It does make sense, I suppose,’ the other Thames Ironworks man was saying, ‘that Germany should want to delay our Dreadnought schedule.’

  There was general nodding at this.

  ‘They don’t care about your Dreadnought schedule,’ I said.

  The nodding stopped. As usual, I was contradicting everyone.

  ‘They want a fire-control table.’

  There was mixed grumbling at this: doubt or concern. The old man only nodded, as if he’d known this all along.

  ‘But the chaos at Wapping, around the Thunderer; and now they’re obviously planning something against the Colossus at Greenock.’

  ‘What, exactly?’ I said. ‘They’re going to throw stones at it? Paint dirty pictures on the side? Steal it? I’ve never hijacked a battleship myself,’ – Bunce looked sceptical – ‘but I assume there’s more to it than when you jump a chap’s horse while he’s having a piss or bump-start a motor-carriage.’ Bunce was wondering whether he’d just heard a confession. ‘Even with a concerted programme of sabotage, how much could they delay a ship?’ I glanced at Stackhouse, who shrugged in agreement. ‘A week or two? That’s hardly going to change the balance of power in Europe, is it?’

  They waited. In their defence, I’d had more time to think all this through.

  ‘Unless they sail one of their own battleships up the Thames or shell Glasgow docks – and I assume even the Foreign Office would ask questions at that point’ – the Foreign Office chap looked non-committal – ‘they can’t actually stop the battleship. But from what you’ve told me, the one thing that might alter the current balance of power is if Germany gets her hands on a fire-control table.’

  Stackhouse and the other Thames Ironworks man were nodding gravely.

  ‘I thought you said that this Swiss radical was the man,’ Sir Percy chipped in. ‘We must not overlook the radical threat. The basis of our nation’s–’

  He was about to start on the benefits of British democracy, so I jumped in. ‘I kept tripping over that point myself, sir. Swiss, German, who knows what he really is? I’m sure that there’s low-level sabotage at the yard caused by these hothea
ds. And I think the Germans have wanted to use the radical activity in the yard as cover for their own interests; they’ve certainly used the conference as cover, and they’ve used it to get some of their people here incognito. But I kept asking myself: what would these people have to gain from the trouble of the last week, beyond a general sense of jolly mayhem? And what on earth would a bunch of Swiss revolutionaries want with a fire control table? What are they going to do: put it on a rowing boat and go round and round Lake Geneva lobbing mortar shells into France?’

  I shook my head. ‘While we’ve been fretting at all these revolutionaries with their speeches, and the general threat of radicalism in the shipyards, the Germans have had a very specific objective.’

  Stackhouse began, ‘I still don’t see–’

  ‘I think they started with bribery, or some light blackmail. Perhaps they tried others first, but in any case they came to David Sinclair. I suspect they got their hooks into him right enough – poor chap could never refuse a loan – and eventually suggested he could buy his way out of trouble with the technical drawings for the fire-control table. But at some point he baulked. Poor man was being pulled apart.’ I thought of Pamela Sinclair, and her wrecked face and her wrecked life. ‘By that point he knew too much about who they were – perhaps he’d seen how they were using the trade union and the international radical visit as cover – and so they killed him.’

  I hesitated. ‘I’m also worried about an acquaintance of his. A man named Samuel Greenberg, of the Commercial Correspondence Confederation. Sinclair had been spending quite a bit of time with him, and that was somehow bound up with his concern about the yard.’

  The Assistant Commissioner leaned towards his man. ‘Bunce, have you, er…come across, this, er…?’

  With impressive speed, Bunce switched from his expression of scornful dismissal to one of complacent competence. ‘All part of the enquiry, sir’, he lied. ‘We’ll track him down.’

  He looked at me bleakly. In a moment of weakness, I repeated the names for him to write down. Then I pressed on. ‘With Sinclair unco-operative, and then out of the way, the Germans had to try something else.’

  ‘They attacked the shipyard,’ Savary said. ‘Destroyed vital drawings.’

  ‘But what would that achieve?’ This from the other Thames Ironworks man. ‘We can replace them inside a day, and they don’t get the details.’ He shook his head, and Stackhouse echoed the movement.

  ‘No.’ The old man. ‘They didn’t burn them. Now I call that smart.’ He looked at me, and smiled grimly. ‘They set a fire to cover the fact that they had removed one set of drawings. The fire-control table, no doubt.’

  The Foreign Office man said: ‘So why all this–’

  Sir Percy Savary was coming up slowly but hard to stop: ‘So they do have a set of our drawings? Of the fire-control table? But this is disastrous! Our nation’s–’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, yes and no.’

  This had the clarifying effect you’d expect. I looked warily at Inspector Bunce. ‘You see, I was in the drawings office that night.’

  Bunce’s eyes went wide. He didn’t quite know what it meant, but he knew things were looking up in his campaign to get me back into his cell.

  There was a general harrumphing from the others – all except the old man, who was watching me with his usual style, a faintly amused appraisal. ‘I’d, er, discovered that these important drawings had been called forward to the yard, and I was trying to follow them.’ Bunce was looking wolfish. ‘Anyway, long story, but I’d disturbed the papers so that when these chaps broke in after me, and took what they thought were the technical drawings for the fire-control table, they actually got something else. The fire-control table drawings burned.’

  ‘You’re sure? Those very particular papers?’ Thames Ironworks man. The intensity was understandable, I suppose, given that we were discussing one of the most precious documents in Britain.

  ‘I’m sure. I… I used them as a torch to set fire to the door.’

  They were all gazing at me, a general sense of bewilderment and disapproval. ‘I destroyed them, but’ – I looked at Bunce – ‘it worked out rather for the best, I think.’

  ‘Indeed.’ The old man. ‘Then we tightened security on the drawings, and the enemy have to find another way.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘And the only way left to them is to steal the thing itself. And that’s why the German agents, pretending to be Swiss or whatever as part of the radical delegation, are heading for Glasgow now.’

  ‘So it’s… sort of a race,’ Stackhouse said.

  ‘I hope not quite so melodramatic,’ I said. I glanced between him and his colleague. ‘When does the fire-control table get to Glasgow docks and the ship? Is it there already, or will it come up later when the fitting-out is further advanced?’

  The colleague was uncomfortable. He glanced at Stackhouse, and then the rest of us. ‘Well, our company is not building the H.M.S. Colossus, of course, so I don’t–’

  ‘But you were sent here on behalf of the industry, I think.’ The old man: quiet and cold. ‘And you have that information.’

  ‘Get on with it, man!’ Sir Percy. Loud and hot.

  The colleague opened his briefcase. Then he searched his pockets until he found a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. Then he dropped his spectacles, and Stackhouse had to help him find them. After various attempts at stabbing himself in the eye, he got the spectacles installed, and started riffling through the papers in his case, methodically flicking over each page corner with a wet finger.

  ‘It shouldn’t be in Glasgow yet,’ he said.

  Our set of tense glaring faces told him that more was needed.

  ‘It should come up by train when the vessel is ready for the command systems to be installed.’

  Sir Percy Savary’s face in particular looked close to explosion.

  More flicking through pages. ‘Ooh. I see. Yes, it should be due around about this time.’

  He didn’t even bother looking up at us. Another page turned. At last he found it. ‘Today,’ he said, looking rather hunted. ‘It goes up the west coast railway line to Glasgow today.’

  I looked at Stackhouse again. ‘Now it’s a race.’

  51.

  I’m not the heartiest supporter of our diplomats and police, as I hope you’ll understand, but I must give them their due. Once they had a clear problem and a clear plan of action, they moved damned smartly.

  Well, the police, anyway. The diplomats continued to faff, but at least they didn’t get under people’s feet too much.

  The Foreign Office didn’t believe my theory that the German Embassy was behind it – ‘but he and the Permanent Under-Secretary saw Giselle together last week; it can’t be true’ – but they did at least acknowledge the theoretical proposition that a German campaign of bribery, industrial espionage, theft and murder would in principle offer an occasion for a re-appraisal of the tone of the diplomatic relationship.

  The police, in the shape of Inspector Ernest Bunce, still fancied me guilty of… something. Anything. But while they worked out what it might be, they’d acknowledged that the possibility of foreign agents stealing a piece of vital naval technology would be a crime, and one that they should stop. The Assistant Commissioner and the old man had been very clear, and Bunce to his credit had had policemen and telegrams flying all over the place.

  Stackhouse and his colleague had checked the paperwork and confirmed that the fire-control table for the HMS Colossus would be in a crate in its own railway wagon, which would be attached to the London-to-Glasgow train at Crewe.

  Here at Birmingham we were off the main line, of course. Bunce had hauled in the Station Master and interrogated him about train times. Two minutes later he was hurrying Stackhouse and I out of the waiting room and the station and into two motor-cars, which somehow were ready and running with police drivers goggled and gloved and waiting for us.

  Bunce yelled instructions over his shoulder as the
cars began to move, and the world disappeared in dust as we started careering through the chaos of Birmingham and out into open country. All I knew was the choking dust, and vague shapes that loomed at us and disappeared as the car veered away, and a constant exchange between the horn and shouting angry passers-by.

  It’s about twenty miles from Birmingham to Tamworth, and we did them in as many minutes. I’d think that a fair speed on a railway train; in a motor-car it was staggering – literally. The vehicles had good strong springs – perhaps a special police adjustment. They might have been robust protection for the car’s mechanism but the passengers got shaken to hell. When the cars skidded to a halt outside Tamworth railway station, on the main line north, we pretty much fell out of them and weaved on bewildered legs that would not answer properly away and onto the platform.

  ‘What the devil do you people think you’re playing at?’ The train was already there, and obviously had been for some while. Dimly I saw a uniformed railway official stomping towards us. ‘Don’t you people know what it means to hold this train?’ Clouds of steam, and faces watching us from every window. ‘Your interference means chaos–’ But Bunce had pushed him aside and told him to get on with it, and then we were tumbling into the first door we saw and collapsing into seats and breathing hard. Bunce had no idea what it meant to hold the train, but he’d done it.

  We were four: Hugh Stackhouse of the Thames Ironworks Shipbuilding Company, and I, and Bunce and a man who’d been in the second car with him, and who I now saw was another policeman. Uniformed, this one, though you could barely tell under the dust. We all looked like we’d come through an explosion.

  Something about the policeman seemed familiar.

  Bunce saw me looking at the uniform and the ruddy face above it. ‘You probably don’t remember Sergeant Bulstrode, Delamere,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Bulstrode doesn’t like you either.’

  As introductions go, it wasn’t the most suave. I was about to explain exactly how little of a damn I gave on either point. But the Sergeant jumped in quickly. ‘That’s all right, sir,’ he said. The voice was a measured west country trudge. ‘These things happen in the course of duty.’