The Shadow in the North Read online

  She gave the card to Sally.

  "You will be careful, won't you?" she said. "Oh, you know your business, of course you do. I'll write to Sidney and let him know. But I am uneasy, there's no denying it. You won't get him into trouble?"

  Sally promised that she wouldn't, and left for Burton Street.

  She was diffident about going in, but she didn't pause for long. There was an air of bustle and confusion about the place, because the plasterers were moving out of the new studio and the glaziers hadn't arrived, and Webster was angrily dealing with the foreman from the decorating firm. She found Frederick coming out of the old studio with some exposed plates in his hand.

  "Hello," he said neutrally.

  "I've been to see Mrs Seddon," she said in the same tone. "I think I know what North Star Castings does. Are you very busy?"

  "Just let me take these to Mr Potts. Jim's in the kitchen."

  She went through the shop and found Jim at the kitchen bench, scowling at an untidy pile of paper and a bottle of ink. He thrust them away when she came in and turned to face her.

  "What's up, Sal?" he said.

  "I'll tell you in a minute, when Fred comes in. . . How's your tooth?"

  He made a face. "Spoiled me beauty, ain't it?" he said. "It doesn't hurt much, but broken bits keep working their way out. I'd like another crack at that bugger's nose, I don't mind admitting. . ."

  "Right, what's it all about then?" said Frederick, shutting the door behind him.

  She went through what Mrs Seddon had told her. When she'd finished, Jim gave a long whistle.

  "So that's what he's up to!" he said. "Guns on railway carriages. . ."

  "I'm not sure," said Sally. "Walker and Sons made locomotives, not carriages. And this Hopkinson Self-Regulator sounds as if it's got something to do with steam. One of us will have to go up there and find out. I've got Mr Paton's address." She looked at Frederick. "Could you. . ."

  He said nothing for a moment, and then, "Yes, I suppose I could. But why me? I'd have thought you'd be the best person to go, since you made the first contact. Besides, you know a lot more about guns than I do."

  She flushed. "I'm not so good at talking to people," she said. "There'd be a lot of . . . well, detecting. Talking to people and finding things out. You're good at that, and I'm not. You're the best. It's got to be you."

  There was another meaning in those words, she hoped her eyes were expressing it too. Her cheeks were hot, but she faced him directly, and saw him nod. He looked up at the clock.

  "Half-past ten," he said. "Jim, could you pass me the Bradshaw?"

  Bradshaw's Railway Guide informed him that there would be a train leaving King's Cross in a little over half an hour. While Jim went to call a cab and Frederick threw some things into a bag, Sally scribbled a quick summary of what Mrs Seddon had told her and added Mr Paton's address. Then her pencil paused, but before she could add anything else Frederick came back with his cloak and hat. She folded the paper and gave it to him.

  "What's today? Thursday? I'll have a scout around, see what else I can find out. Be back on Saturday, I expect. Goodbye."

  That was all he said.

  "Mr Blaine's going mad in there," said Jim when he came back. "I think I'll give him a hand with his orders. I got nothing else to do. I was going to see Nellie Budd later on - fancy coming? See whether she's come round, poor old gal?"

  "I'm going to the Patent Library," Sally told him. "I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Whatever this Hopkinson thing is, there'll be a patent for it."

  "You really think it's got something to do with North Star? Well, I suppose it cropped up in Nellie Budd's trance. . . Here, I've just had a thought. Miss Meredith - I know she's a needlewoman, but she can manage clerical stuff all right. And at a guess she'll be feeling like a useless burden and blaming herself for everything and not wanting to be in the way and generally making everyone miserable. No, all right, I take it back, that ain't fair; but she could do Mr Blaine's stuff, couldn't she? Kill two birds with one stone. Stop the old boy from going off his nut, and help her feel she's doing something useful. What about it?"

  For answer she went and kissed him.

  "Well, that's better than a whisticaster in the rattlers," he said.

  "A what?"

  "A smack in the gob. Good idea, then, is it? I'll go and see her before I go to the hospital. Take her mind off Mackinnon - maybe."

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE STEAM GUN

  The rail connections were excellent; it wasn't much after six o'clock when Frederick booked into the Railway Hotel at Barrow, and only a little later when he found the address Sally had written down. He knocked at the door of the little terraced house and looked around at the rest of the street. It was hard to tell what it would be like in daylight; he had the impression of respectability just a shade away from poverty. Every door-knocker shone in the gaslight, every doorstep was scrubbed - but in the very next street, sewage flowed down the open gutter.

  The door was opened by an anxious-looking woman in her fifties.

  "Mrs Paton?" said Frederick, taking off his hat. "Is Mr Paton in - Mr Sidney Paton?"

  "Yes, he is," she said. "Is it. . . It's not from the landlord, is it?"

  "No, no," said Frederick. "My name's Garland. A colleague of mine was talking to your sister-in-law, Mrs Seddon, and she happened to mention Mr Paton's name. I came up here in the hope that I might be able to talk to him."

  She let him in, still anxious, and led him through to the little kitchen, where her husband was mending a pair of boots. He stood up to shake hands - a small, slight man, with a heavy moustache and the same anxiety in his eyes as his wife had.

  "I'd ask you into the parlour, Mr Garland," he said, "but there's no fire. And anyway most of the furniture's had to go. Some of it we've had since our wedding day. . . What can I do for you?"

  "I won't beat about the bush, Mr Paton," said Frederick. "I want your help, and I'll pay for it. Here's five pounds to start with."

  Mrs Paton gave a faint exclamation and sat down. Mr Paton wonderingly took the note Frederick handed him, but put it on the table.

  "I don't deny that five pounds would be a blessing," he said slowly, "but I'll need to know the sort of help you want before I accept it, Mr Garland. Oh - please sit down."

  Mrs Paton, recovered from her surprise, stood up to take Frederick's coat and hat, and he sat where Mr Paton indicated, in the armchair on the other side of the fire. He looked around; plates and cups gleamed on a dresser in the warm lamplight, damp tea-towels hung over a line, a stout ginger cat dozed on the hearth, and a pair of spectacles rested on a copy of Emma beside the cobbler's last where Mr Paton's boot was being resoled. Mr Paton saw where he was looking, and sat down opposite him.

  "Plenty of time for reading these days," he said. "I've worked my way through Dickens and Thackeray and Walter Scott, and I'm on Jane Austen now. Blow me if she's not the best of the lot. Well, Mr Garland. How can I help?"

  Frederick, liking the man at once, decided to tell him everything. The recital took some time, during which Mrs Paton made some tea and put out a plate of biscuits.

  "So what I need to know," he said finally, "is just what's going on at North Star Castings. Now if you decide you can't tell me, or you feel you shouldn't because of this secrecy business, I'll understand. But I've told you all the background so you can see why I want to know, and what's at stake. What d'you say?"

  Mr Paton nodded. "That sounds fair to me. And I must say I've never heard a tale like this before. . . What do you say, my dear?"

  His wife, seated at the table, had listened wide-eyed as Frederick had talked.

  "You tell him," she said. "You tell him as much as you like. You don't owe that firm a thing."

  "Good," said Mr Paton. "That's what I think. Right, Mr Garland. . ."

  During the next twenty minutes Frederick learned all that had happened to the railway works since Bellmann had taken them over. They were now call
ed the Transport Division of North Star Castings, Limited, the other half - the armaments firm that used to be known as Furness Castings - now being called the Research Division, a fact about which Mr Paton was quietly bitter.

  "They're very clever, these men, whoever they are," he said, settling back into his wooden armchair and accepting the attentions of the cat, which jumped up into his lap. "Research Division. Sounds harmless, doesn't it? Well, research means one thing to you and me, and quite another to North Star Castings, Limited. Murder and bloodshed division, more like. But that wouldn't look so good on the factory gates, would it?"

  "Why these two firms, though?" said Frederick. "What have they got in common?"

  "I'll tell you what the talk is, Mr Garland. It's supposed to be a secret, but word gets around. . . I hear a certain amount at the Institute. I can't really afford the subscription these days, but my sister's been very good. . .

  "Anyway, the word is that North Star Castings is developing a new kind of gun. It's got some polite name, of course - it's called the Hopkinson Self-Regulating Device, or some such - but the name that gets whispered around here is the Steam Gun."

  Frederick sat up and took out his pocket-book. He found the scrap of paper on which Jim had written down the words Nellie Budd had spoken in her trance, smoothed it out, and handed it to Mr Paton.

  He reached for his glasses and tilted the paper to the lamplight to read it.

  "'It isn't Hopkinson, but they're not to know. . . The regulator. . . North Star . . . a mist all full of fire - steam, and it's packed with death, packed in pipes - steam pipes - under the north star. . ." he read aloud. Then he put the paper down. "Well, if this isn't the strangest thing I ever heard. . . Now look, Mr Garland, I don't know the first thing about guns, I'm glad to say. And as for this Hopkinson thing, well, I can't help you at all - but I can take you to a man who could. Whether he will or not I can't promise - but Henry Waterman's a decent sort of feller, and I know for a fact that he's not happy about what he's helping to make. He was one of those who thought hard before signing on. I think he's wishing now he hadn't done it. He's a Unitarian, Henry; a man of conscience, you might say."

  Twenty minutes later, Mr Paton took Frederick into a plain-fronted house that bore a painted sign proclaiming it to be The Workingmen's Literary and Philosophical Institute.

  "We've got a fine library here, Mr Garland," he said. "We have a debate on the second Tuesday of every month, and courses of lectures when we can raise a subscription for them. . . Look, there's Henry Waterman now. Come along and I'll introduce you."

  They went into the library, a small room plainly furnished with a table and half a dozen chairs, and lined with shelves containing books on a variety of social and philosophical topics. Mr Waterman was reading by the light of an oil-lamp; he was a heavy, serious-looking man of fifty or so.

  "Henry, let me introduce Mr Garland, from London. He's a detective," said Mr Paton.

  Mr Waterman stood up to shake hands, and for the second time Frederick went through his story, though this time he shortened it. Mr Waterman listened attentively. When Frederick had finished, he nodded as if he'd just solved a problem.

  "Mr Garland, you've made up my mind for me," he said. "I'm going to break a promise now, but I consider it was a promise they had no right to get. I'll tell you about the Steam Gun.

  "It's a weapon on an entirely new principle - new mechanically, new strategically, new in every way. I'm a boiler-maker myself, I know nothing about guns, but I can tell you that this one's a horrible thing. I've been working on a system of tubing to feed high-pressure steam into it - the most complicated bit of engineering you ever saw in your life, but lovely drawings, lovely design, really beautifully thought out. I never knew, Mr Garland, that a piece of machinery could be beautiful and wicked at the same time.

  "It's mounted on an ordinary-looking railway carriage - specially reinforced and sprung. The boiler and firebox are at the back of it, fairly small, doesn't have to pull the train along, after all, but very powerful. We can reach four hundred pounds per square inch easy; I'd say there was another hundred in reserve. And she burns coke - smokeless, see. You'd never know she was alight.

  "Now you hear the word gun and you think of a long barrel sticking out, don't you? Well, it's not like that. The carriage looks like any ordinary freight carriage, apart from the holes. Tiny little holes - six thousand on each side. Thirty rows, two hundred in a row. And out of each hole come five bullets every second. . . That's what the steam's for, you see. Can you imagine turning a handle for twelve thousand machine guns at once? It needs every one of those four hundred pounds of steam, Mr Garland.

  "And that's not the end of it. I'm not too familiar with the firing side - getting the steam along the pipes is my job - but from what I've heard, there's a kind of Jacquard mechanism they can bring into play to regulate the firing pattern. I'm sure you've seen the things - a series of cards with holes punched in 'em. They use 'em in weaving, to put patterns in the cloth. Well, with this mechanism, the gunner can have one row firing at a time, then the next one down, then the next, and so on; or he can have all the columns firing in turn; or he can fire in blocks, or in short bursts from the whole gun - any way he pleases. Only it doesn't use punched cards, this regulator - it's the same principle, but it's done with electrical connections: lines drawn on a roll of waxed paper using a dense kind of graphite. I tell you, Mr Garland, the man who designed this is little short of a genius. It's the most stunning piece of machinery I ever saw in my life.

  "And it's evil. It's monstrous. Can you imagine the effect on a body of men? Every cubic inch of air within - oh, five hundred, a thousand yards, filled with a red-hot bullet? Devastation isn't the word. You'd need something from the Book of Revelations to describe it.

  "So that's the Steam Gun. There's one already sent abroad - I don't know where. There's a second nearly ready now - another week or two, and it'll be ready to test. . . So you see, Mr Garland, why I'm not happy about it. Sidney here thought harder about this business than I did, and I wish I'd had the courage to say no, like him, at the start. The thought that my skill - and I'm proud of my skill - that my craftsmanship's been perverted into making something like this - the thought that my own countrymen are busy helping it into the world - I tell you, it makes me sick at the heart."

  He stopped, and ran his hands through his short, iron-grey hair before laying them flat on the table on either side of his book. Sally'd like this man, Frederick thought.

  "Mr Waterman, I'm extremely grateful. I've got a lot of things clear now. But what about the management of the firm? Do you know the name Bellmann?"

  "Bellmann?" Mr Waterman shook his head. "Can't say I've ever heard that name. But it's common knowledge there's foreign money in the firm somewhere. He's a foreigner, is he, this Mr Bellmann?"

  "Swedish. But there's a Russian connection to this, as well."

  "Russian! Now there's a thing. You remember I mentioned the designer? Said he must be a genius? Well, his name's Hopkinson. That's what we've been told, though no one's seen him. On the drawings we're working from, it's abbreviated to HOP. But it looks odd - almost as though it had been four letters, and they'd scraped off the K. And in one place . . . tucked away, not really visible - I saw this. Here, I'll write it for you."

  He borrowed Frederick's pencil and wrote:

  "Now that last letter isn't a K, it's a D. Are you familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet, Mr Garland? I take an interest in languages, or I shouldn't have recognized it. And seeing that as a D made the other letters sort of change themselves in my mind. It's Russian, you see. In our script it'd be this."

  He wrote:

  "Nordenfels!" said Frederick. "By Heaven, Mr Waterman, you've cracked it!"

  "Nordenfels?" said Mr Waterman.

  "A Swedish engineer. Disappeared in Russia. Very probably murdered. Well, I'm damned. . . That's wonderful. And you say they're going to test the new gun in a week or two?"

  "That's righ
t. They've tested separate systems, such as the boiler, obviously, and the cartridge feed, and the electrical generator, but it's nearly all together now, and then they'll take it up to Thurlby for testing. They test big naval guns up there, on floating targets out at sea sometimes.

  "And that's about all I know, Mr Garland. But now I reckon you can tell me something. What's your interest in this? And what are you going to do about it?"

  Frederick nodded. "Fair questions. I'm a detective, Mr Waterman, and I'm interested in the man behind all this. Steam Guns aren't illegal, as far as I know, but I'm beginning to see what he's up to, and as soon as I can pin something on him, I will. But I'll tell you what I'd like to do with the gun, and that's blow it off the face of the earth."

  "Hear, hear," said Mr Paton.

  "Well, I could show you -" began Mr Waterman, but then the door opened, and in came another man, carrying a couple of books.

  "Oh, beg your pardon, Henry," he said. "Don't mind me, carry on. Evening, Sidney. . ."

  The other two were slightly taken aback, but Frederick said, "And what other facilities does your Institute provide, Mr Waterman?"

  "Ah - yes, Mr Garland. Well, it grew out of the Cooperative Society, and the original nucleus was this very library. . . Some of the books were donated by the Rochdale Corresponding Society. . ."

  It was clear that the other man wasn't going to go. In fact he joined in to tell the history of the place. Frederick soon became aware of two things: first, that they were all very proud of what they'd built up, and deserved to be; and second, that he was growing thirstier by the minute.

  After declining an invitation to see over the rest of the building and inspect the accounts of the Cooperative Society (a pleasure he said he'd reserve for his next visit), he said goodbye to Henry Waterman and left - and found himself staring, for no good reason, at a playbill on the wall of the building opposite.