The Shadow in the North, Page 24

  Sally felt dazed.

  She had come here expecting to face anger, scorn, violence, and she was prepared for that; this left her breathless. She let her hands rest where they were. Her head was ringing. Now that they were actually touching, she felt the force of the man as never before. His personality was mesmerizing, his very flesh was electric with energy, his eyes held her transfixed, the flow of his words was irresistible. She had to struggle for the strength to speak, but then she found it, and opened her mouth.

  "I -" was all she had time to say, for there was an urgent knock at the door.

  Bellmann let go of her hands and looked around. "Yes? What is it?"

  The servant opened the door, and there stood Alistair Mackinnon. Sally sank back in her chair, half fainting.

  He was terrified, that was plain. He was dripping wet - it was obviously raining hard outside - and the hand that held his hat was shaking uncontrollably. He glanced from Sally to Bellmann and back to Sally again, and then fixed his eyes, wide with fear, on the financier.

  "I have come for - Miss Lockhart," he said faintly.

  Bellmann didn't move.

  "I don't understand," he said.

  "Miss Lockhart," said Mackinnon, tearing his eyes away from Bellmann and addressing her directly, "Jim Taylor and I have come to - to help you home. Jim is - he's hurt, you know. His leg is broken. He couldn't walk in here, he's at the gate. We came because. . ." His eyes flickered back to Bellmann, and then to Sally again. "You can - come away now," he finished.

  And she saw the courage that he'd had to summon up to enter the house of the man who'd been going to kill him, and found the strength to speak.

  "It's too late, Mr Mackinnon," she said. She forced herself to sit up straight, as straight as Miss Susan Walsh had done in her office and, with an effort that almost made her faint again, she controlled her voice and said, "Mr Bellmann has just asked me to marry him. I am on the point of deciding whether or not to accept his offer."

  She sensed Mackinnon's incredulity. Keeping her eyes away from Bellmann, she went on:

  "It depends on whether he can afford it. My hand in marriage will cost Mr Bellmann three thousand, two hundred and seventy pounds. That is the sum of money I tried to persuade him to give me some time ago. I had nothing to sell him then. But now that he has expressed an interest in marrying me, perhaps the situation has altered, I don't know."

  Mackinnon was unable to speak. He seemed helpless in the electric charge that flowed between Sally and Bellmann.

  His eyes moved back to Bellmann, and then he jumped, startled, as Bellmann laughed.

  "Ha, ha, ha! I was right - you are a match for me! Of course you shall have it. In gold? Now?" he said.

  She nodded, and Bellmann got to his feet, feeling on his watch-chain for a key. When he'd found it he opened a small safe behind the desk and, as they watched, took out three small sealed bags, threw them on the desk, and tore the seal off another, tipping it upside down. A flood of glittering coins spilled out on the blotter. He swiftly counted out three thousand, two hundred and seventy pounds' worth, returned them to the bag, and pushed all four bags towards Sally.

  "Yours," he said. "To the penny."

  She stood. The die was cast now; there was no going back. She gathered the bags of gold and handed them to Mackinnon. His hands were shaking more than hers.

  "Please," she said, "do this for me. Take this money to Miss Susan Walsh, of Number Three, Benfleet Avenue, Croydon. Can you remember that?"

  He repeated the name and address, and then said helplessly, "But Jim - he's made me come here - I can't -"

  "Hush," she said. "It's all over now. I'm going to marry Mr Bellmann. Please go. Tell Jim. . . No, say nothing to Jim. Just go."

  He looked like a lost child. With one last glance at Bellmann, he nodded faintly and left.

  As the door closed behind him Sally sank down into the chair again, and in a moment Bellmann had surged forward to kneel at her side. It was like a dam breaking. He took her hands, and she felt as if all that power he had talked about, all those metamorphoses and alterations, had come to their final state in him: that he was steam power, electric power, mechanical power, financial power made flesh. He kissed her hands again and again, and his kisses were somehow charged with the sulphurous crackle she'd heard from the wires beside the railway lines on the walk through the valley to the house.

  But it was done now. It was nearly finished.

  "I am tired," she said. "I want to sleep. But before I lie down, I'd like to see the Steam Gun. Can you take me there and show me what it's like? It would be a pity to come all this way and not see it."

  "Of course," he said, and rose at once to ring the bell. "It is a good time to see it. I love the works at night. We are making great progress with electric lighting, you know. What do you know about gunnery, my dear?"

  She stood up and gathered her heavy bag from the floor. It was quite easy now, as long as her voice kept steady, as long as she didn't tremble.

  "As a matter of fact," she said, "I know a good deal. But I am always prepared to learn more."

  He laughed happily as they walked to the front door.

  The guard let Mackinnon out of the gate and locked it again behind him. Half-running, half-stumbling, clutching the bags of gold to his chest, Mackinnon made his way through the driving rain to the cab where Jim sat nursing the brandy flask, almost delirious with pain.

  Jim couldn't take it in at first. Mackinnon had to go through it twice, and then shake the bags so Jim could hear the coins jingling.

  "Marry him?" said Jim thickly. "She said that?"

  "Aye - it was like a bargain - she was selling herself for this gold! And I had to promise to take it to a lady in Croydon -"

  "Her client," said Jim. "The one she lost the money for. . . In Bellmann's firm, see. . . Oh, you bloody fool, what you want to let her do that for?"

  "Me? I couldnae - it was her in charge, Jim, you know how strong she is -"

  "No, I didn't mean that, mate. You did all right. You had the guts to go in there. We're all square now. I meant me. Oh, God, this leg, I don't know what I mean. I'm worried, Mackinnon. I think she's going to. . . If I had a stick, maybe I could. . ."

  He groaned again, and rocked to and fro in his agony. The flask, nearly empty now, took a quivering journey to his lips, and then fell to the floor of the cab, making the patient horse shake its harness. The rain was lashing down even harder outside. Mackinnon wiped the sweat off Jim's forehead with his sleeve, but Jim didn't notice.

  "Help me out," he mumbled. "She's up to something - I don't like the sound of it. Come on, man, give us a hand. . ."

  Bellmann tenderly held the waterproof cloak around Sally with one arm and an umbrella over them both with the other as they hastened down the gravel path towards the brightly lit building where the Steam Gun stood. He had given orders for the whole compound to be illuminated, and each light that came on gleamed yellowly in a halo of moisture and splashing drops.

  The building was called Shed Number One. As she'd seen from the edge of the valley, it was isolated from the rest of the works, and they had to cross an open area of wet gravel, with the rain driving in hard, before they reached the shelter of the wall. A watchman, warned that they were coming, dragged the great door open on its rollers, and a blast of heat and light greeted them.

  "Dismiss the men for half an hour," Bellmann told the foreman who came towards them. "They may go to the canteen and refresh themselves. This is an extra break; I shall take charge of the boiler myself. I want the building empty for my guest."

  Sally stood by while the dozen or so men downed tools and left. Some of them glanced curiously at her, some looked neither at her nor at Bellmann. There was a muted, restrained quality in their attitude to Bellmann; she couldn't place it until she realized that it was fear.

  When the last of them had gone, and the great door was rolled back in place, he helped her step up on to a platform overlooking the length of the b
uilding, turned to her, and said, "My kingdom, Sally."

  It was like a railway engine shed. There were three separate parallel rail tracks, and on each stood what looked like a heavy freight carriage in the course of construction. The one furthest away was still only a chassis, but she could see the massive iron framework which would hold the firebox, the boiler and, she supposed, the firing mechanism. The central one was nearly complete, but for its shell: a mass of enormously complex pipework, too intricate for the eye to penetrate, with a travelling crane on a beam holding part of the boiler suspended above it.

  The third machine was finished. It stood in front of them on its rails, brightly lit, with a fire glowing in the heart of it which Sally could just make out through the window - like that of a conventional guard's van - at the rear. It looked like a perfectly normal goods carriage: a closed van made of wood, with a metal roof. In the centre of the roof stood a squat little chimney, surmounted by a cowl. The only oddity was the large number of small holes in the side, which Henry Waterman had described to Frederick: row upon row of tiny black dots, looking from the platform like rivets or nail heads.

  "Would you care to see it more closely?" he said. "If you like guns, this will fascinate you. We must keep an eye on the working pressure, or the foreman will be angry with us. They are testing the automatic grate tonight. . ."

  He led her along to the rear of the carriage, climbed up and opened the door, and then leant down and lifted her up and into the little compartment. It looked like a miniature version of what she had seen inside many locomotives, except that the firebox, glowing red, was at the side. The controls were slightly different too; instead of driving pistons in their cylinders, this boiler supplied steam to different sections of the interior of the carriage, labelled Chambers One to Twenty, Port and Starboard.

  Where the boiler was in a normal engine, there was a narrow passage that led into the heart of the machine. It was lit by the glow of an electric lamp.

  "Where is the boiler?" Sally asked.

  "Ah! The boiler is the secret of it," he said. "Quite unlike the conventional design. A masterpiece of engineering. Much flatter, you see, and more compact than the ordinary shape - it has to be, in order to make space for the gunnery. Nowhere but here could it be made so perfectly."

  "Does the gunner sit here?" Sally asked. She was surprised to find her voice so firm.

  "Oh, no. In the very centre. Come this way. . ."

  Moving delicately, despite his massive frame, he edged sideways along the passage in front of her. Four or five steps took them to a compartment only big enough for one, with a swivelling chair and a mass of switches and levers on a polished mahogany board. An electric lamp gleamed overhead. Beside the chair, on each side of the compartment, metal racks reached into the darkness, and Sally could make out row upon row, coil upon coil, of glistening cartridges. The heat was intense.

  "How does the gunner see out?" she said.

  He reached up and pulled at a handle which she had not noticed. Out of the ceiling a wide tube, with a cloth-covered eyepiece, slid silently down.

  "An arrangement of mirrors in here lets him see out of the false chimney on top. He can see all around, three hundred and sixty degrees, a perfect view, by swivelling the tube. That was an invention of my own."

  "So it's ready to fire?" she said.

  "Oh, yes. We are ready to test it on the range tomorrow morning for a visitor from Prussia. You may come with me. I promise you, you will never have seen anything like it. I would like to show you the pipework, Sally - all around this compartment there are altogether five and a half miles of piping! The gunner communicates with the engineer by means of a signal telegraph, and he controls the firing pattern with these levers here - you see? There is a Jacquard mechanism connected to the firing tubes, and by selecting the pattern from this diagram, according to the instructions on the electric telegraph here, he can fire in any one of thirty-six different ways. Sally, there has been nothing like this weapon since the beginning of time. It is the most beautiful device the mind of man has ever conceived. . ."

  She stood for a moment, feeling her head swim in the heat.

  "And is the ammunition live?" she said.

  "Yes. It's ready to go. Ready to fire!"

  He was standing triumphantly, with his hand on the back of the swivel chair, in the only bit of spare floor space the compartment possessed. She stood at the entrance to the passageway, and she suddenly felt a great cold clarity sweep through her, a sense of freedom and release. This was the moment she had come for.

  She reached into her bag and took out her little Belgian pistol from the oilskin pocket she kept it in, and cocked the hammer with her thumb.

  Bellmann heard the click. He looked down at her hand, and then up again. She faced him squarely.

  Fred's face in the rain; his bare arms in the candle-light; his laughing green eyes. . .

  "You killed Frederick Garland," she said, for the second time that night.

  Bellmann opened his mouth, but she raised the pistol a little higher, and went on:

  "And I loved him. Whatever made you think you could replace him? Nothing I have for however long I live will make up for him. He was brave and he was good and he trusted human goodness, Mr Bellmann; he understood things you'll never understand, like decency and democracy and truth and honour. Everything you said to me in your study made me sick and cold and frightened, because I thought for a minute that you were right - about everything, about people, about the world. But you're not - you're wrong. You may be strong and cunning and influential; you may think you're saying the truth about the way the world works, but you're wrong, because you don't understand loyalty, you don't understand love, you don't understand people like Frederick Garland. . ."

  His eyes were blazing at her, but she gathered the last of her strength and faced them and didn't look away.

  "And no matter how powerful you were," she went on, "no matter if you controlled the whole world and gave everyone the schools and the hospitals and the sports fields you'd decided they wanted, and no matter if everyone was healthy and prosperous and there were statues of you in every city in the world - you'd still be wrong, because the world you want to create is based on fear and deception and murder and lies -"

  He took a step towards her, his great fist raised. She stood her ground and raised the pistol higher.

  "Stand still!" she said, and now her voice was trembling again, and she brought up her left hand to hold the pistol steady. "I came here to get the money I wanted for my client. I told you when we first met that I'd have it, and now I've got it. Marry you - ha! How dare you think you were worth that much? There was only one man I'd marry, and you've killed him. And -"

  She found herself choked with a harsh sob as the thought of Frederick flooded back to her. Bellmann vanished in the starburst of tears, and she found Frederick close beside her again, and whispered shakily, "Did I speak well, Fred? Did I do it right? I'm coming to you now, my darling -"

  And she pointed the gun at the racks of cartridges, and pulled the trigger.

  Jim was clinging to the fence when the first explosion came, his other hand on Mackinnon's shoulder. They were making their way around the perimeter, since the guard refused to leave his hut. The rain was lashing down like thousands of tiny whips.

  The first sound they heard was a muffled crack like thunder. It was followed only a second or two later by another, deeper boom, and as they strained to peer through the downpour they saw a sudden flare from their left, and a jet of flame leapt from the buckled doorway of an isolated building.

  Instantly, alarm bells began to ring. From the nearest lighted building, men ran out, only to dodge back quickly again as a volley of further small explosions followed the first two.

  "She did it," said Jim. "She set it off. I knew she was planning something crazy - oh, Sally, Sally. . ."

  The building that had contained the Steam Gun was leaning over crazily. They could see it in the light of t
he lanterns held by the men who came crowding out again, in the light of the flames that were flickering around the edge of the door. From the cries and shouts, the air of panic, Jim could tell that they were afraid of more explosions. The air was filled with the jangling of bells - and then a siren began to add its banshee howl to the din.

  Jim shook Mackinnon's shoulder.

  "Come on," he said, "they're opening the gate, look - we'll find her, Mackinnon, we'll get her out -"

  And he turned and hobbled back, like a crippled demon. Mackinnon swayed, moaning with fear, and then gathered himself and went after him.

  There followed three hours of fury. Three hours of tearing at fallen beams, of flinging aside twisted pieces of metal and broken bricks and shattered fragments of wood, of burnt hands and broken fingernails and skinned knuckles, of sudden flares of hope and the slowly growing weight of despair.

  The fire brigade had been summoned at once, and with the aid of the emergency crew on the site, they had the main fire under control before long. It seemed that the explosion in the first machine had set off not only the rest of the ammunition on board, but also that stored nearby, waiting to be loaded. The machine itself was unrecognizable; the one beside it was smashed beyond repair, the heavy crane above having fallen on the centre of it. The walls of the building were still standing by a miracle; parts of the roof had collapsed, and it was there that the rescuers were searching, passing down pieces of masonry in a human chain and easing great beams carefully aside so as not to dislodge the rubble.

  Mackinnon was working in the heart of it, side by side with Jim. Something of Jim's demonic energy had passed into him, too, and he worked on despite pain and exhaustion and danger. Once or twice Jim looked across at him and nodded with grim approval, as if Mackinnon were an equal now, as if he'd passed some kind of test.