The Shadow in the North, Page 25

  They found Sally under a corner of the fallen roof as the rain began to ease.

  There was a shout from one of the North Star workers. He was bending down low, waving his arm and pointing in at a part of the fallen building they hadn't touched yet. Within seconds hands were mustered to hold up the length of wooden beam that had kept a section of the wall off her, and little by little, one by one, the pieces of rubble and broken iron that weighed it down were lifted off and passed away safely.

  Jim, crouched as close as he could manage, reached in for her hand. Her blonde hair was spread wide at his feet, streaked with dust and dirt. She was very still.

  Then he saw her eyelids flutter. And at the same moment he found her wrist, with the strong pulse beating steadily.

  "Sally!" he said, and with his other hand stroked the hair off her forehead. He bent low and put his face close to hers. "Sally," he said softly, "come on, gal, it's all right now - we'll get you out - come on, we got work to do back home. . ."

  "Jim?" she whispered. She opened her eyes, and shut them at once against the lights, but she'd seen him and heard him, and she squeezed his hand.

  "You silly bloody cow," Jim whispered back - and fainted.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THE ORCHARD

  It was only because Sally had been standing in the passageway, and Bellmann had left the door open at the rear, that she had survived. The first blast had thrown her clear, and when the exploding ammunition had ruptured the boiler, as she'd known it would, she was out of range of the worst effects.

  Bellmann had been killed at once; they found what was left of him in the morning.

  She was badly shaken but, apart from bruises and a sprained wrist, uninjured. Alistair Mackinnon telegraphed to Charles Bertram, who arrived within a day and took charge, arranging for Jim to be taken back to his own doctor to have his leg reset, finding a doctor for Sally, dealing with the inquiry into the accident.

  For accident it was universally taken to be. The story the papers printed said that while Mr Bellmann, the proprietor, was showing a guest around his factory, an unsuspected fault in a safety-valve was leading to a dangerous increase in pressure in one of the boilers. There was no mention of explosives; no mention of what the factory was producing. It sounded like an ordinary industrial accident - tragic, of course, because of the death of the well-known employer and benefactor, for whom a memorial service was to be held in the parish church.

  So Sally went back to London.

  And, little by little, came back to life.

  The first, and most urgent, problem was the business. Her own files were safe at Mr Temple's, but Garland and Lockhart, that living, growing thing she'd loved so much, was shattered and broken. She had renewed the insurance only months before, so replacing the stock would not be too difficult; though as she knew, a business was much more than its physical assets. She found a shabby studio in Hammersmith and threw the staff into work, subsidizing their wages with her own money until there was enough coming in to pay them properly. She advertised in all the papers, promising that outstanding orders and commissions would be fulfilled with no more than a week's delay. She bought a studio camera, had new stationery printed, took new orders. She bullied, borrowed, bribed, hired, and drove the staff into exhaustion - but it worked. Before a month was out, the turnover had begun to pick up. Sally hoped that the improvement kept up; her own money was dwindling fast.

  But worse than the loss of the business was the blow that Webster had sustained. Everything he'd achieved, his entire life's work in the field of photography, all the great and irreplaceable images he'd captured on glass and paper had vanished as if they'd never existed. It was as if he'd lived his sixty years and done nothing.

  Sally watched helplessly as he went through the motions of working - and then retired at night to the solace of the whisky bottle. She knew he was tough; but she knew he'd loved Frederick like the son he'd never had, and she could only guess what the loss of all his work meant to him.

  Their biggest problem was premises. The studio she'd found in Hammersmith was too small for anything but basic portraiture, and it wasn't in a good spot; the nearest place she could find for the shop was in a dingy building three streets away, and having the two halves of the business inconveniently separate made extra work for everyone.

  But if she took the time to search for somewhere better, and then they moved, that would all be time during which no money was coming in. During the daytime she pushed the problem aside, but it came back to her at night. In the dark she felt a different person: tender-skinned and haunted, she lay awake and wept and whispered to a ghost.

  One morning, as soon as she could, she took a train to Croydon and called on Miss Susan Walsh.

  The old lady was seeing a private pupil when Sally arrived; but she was so shocked by Sally's appearance that she sent the girl away, telling her to come back later, and made Sally sit down by the fire and take a glass of sherry. Sally, cold, tired and grateful, handed her a cheque for the amount she had won back from Bellmann - and burst into tears, much to her own fury.

  "My dear child!" said Miss Walsh. "Whatever have you been doing?"

  An hour later she knew the whole story. When it was over, she shook her head in amazement. Then she took the cheque and laid it on Sally's lap.

  "I want you to invest this money in your firm," she said.

  "But -"

  The old lady stopped her protests with a steely eye.

  "The last advice you gave me," she said quite sharply, "was somewhat unsound. I think you will admit that. This time, Miss Lockhart, I shall do as I think fit with my money. To my mind, Garland and Lockhart will be a safer investment than any shipping firm."

  And she wouldn't be denied. If female emancipation meant anything, she said, it meant the right of one woman to support the work of another in any way she chose, and she would hear no more on the matter. Instead, they shared Miss Walsh's lunch of soup and cheese, and talked about Cambridge. They parted the best of friends.

  Jim spent three weeks in bed. He'd seriously damaged his leg during the search for Sally, and the doctor suspected that he'd walk with a limp for the rest of his life. He spent his time (in a spare room at Trembler Molloy's house in Islington) reading sensational novels, losing his temper at the thinness of their plots, writing a story of his own, tearing it up in a fury, cutting out and carefully sticking together a toy theatre he sent Sally out to buy for him, trying out a plot with the little cardboard characters and losing his patience with them, writing six separate letters to Lady Mary and throwing them all away, tossing and turning in his bed, heaving off the blankets, sweating with pain, and drawing on the deepest wells of his vocabulary to curse the whole state of things with an intensity that might have blistered paint.

  He might have sent a letter to Lady Mary eventually, but a fortnight after they came back to London, he heard from Mackinnon.

  He had decided, he said in his letter, to go with his wife to America. There he would be able to develop his art in a more spacious and forward-looking setting than the English music-hall provided, and discharge his responsibilities as a married man without the hindrances which had lain in his path heretofore. Or that was how he put it.

  Jim showed the letter to Sally.

  "I wonder how long that'll last?" he said sourly. "Mind you, he was all right in the end, old Mackinnon. He did his bit to get you out. And he didn't do a bunk with the gold, like he would have done once. Good luck to him - I suppose. But if he doesn't treat her right. . ."

  He wondered privately how Mackinnon had ever persuaded that lovely, dreaming, tragic girl to share the life of a music-hall wizard, and, for that matter, how her father had reacted when he knew she was really going.

  But Lord Wytham had plenty of other troubles to cope with. He had soon realized that Bellmann knew all the time that Lady Mary was married, and was daring him to admit it; and he knew that he hadn't dared, and he suspected that he'd never see the money he'd
asked for her. He'd been caught several ways. If he admitted he knew about the marriage, he'd lose Bellmann's money - but if he didn't, he'd lay himself open to a charge of conspiring to aid bigamy, and he couldn't decide which was worse. His only chance had been to feign ignorance of the marriage, and to hope not only that news of it would somehow come out before long, but that, in the meantime, he could make himself so useful to Bellmann that his position in the firm would be secure, at least.

  But he felt uneasily that his usefulness to Bellmann was over in any case. He could not understand the discussions at the board meetings he'd attended; he'd made all the introductions he could; such influence in the Civil Service as he'd ever had was slipping away from him.

  Then came the accident at Barrow. In the financial world, Bellmann's death caused a sensation. Though the inquest labelled it accidental, rumours began to circulate that the North Star Castings disaster, as it was called, was closely connected with certain irregularities in Bellmann's other enterprises which were now coming to light. A certain Mr Windlesham, it was reported, was assisting the authorities with their investigations. The price of North Star shares plummeted. At the same time, apparently by coincidence, a number of government officials resigned or were quietly dismissed. Little of it reached the papers. Shortly afterwards the firm collapsed altogether. Lord Wytham's bankruptcy followed almost at once.

  Going to America with Mackinnon, Jim thought, was probably the best thing Lady Mary could do, in the circumstances; and he wished her well.

  The North Star designers and engineers found work with other firms. Some of them went to work for Armstrong-Vickers, the famous arms manufacturers, but they didn't take the plans of the Hopkinson Self-Regulator with them; it was rumoured that someone had broken into the factory and destroyed all record of them. The works opened again as a cooperative bicycle manufactory, but the workers lacked enough capital to make it succeed. It was sold again, and this time went back to the building of railway engines, at which it prospered.

  As soon as Jim could get up, he hobbled out with a stick and found an omnibus to Streatham, and went to pay a call on Nellie Budd.

  She'd recovered from the attack, with her sister Jessie's help, though she was thinner now and she'd lost a lot of her vivacity. When he saw her, Jim felt glad about every blow he'd landed on Sackville and Harris. Jessie was back in the north now, she said, and she was going to sell up down here and join her again. They'd patched up their differences. She was getting tired of the mediumship game anyway, and when she'd recovered a bit more, the two of them were going to work out a mind-reading act and go on the halls together. Jim said he'd watch out for them.

  So time passed.

  And gradually Sally became aware of layers of subtlety in the way the world worked; how nothing was clear or uncomplicated, how everything was patterned with irony.

  Isabel Meredith, first. The two beings Sally had loved entirely, Chaka and Frederick, had both given their lives for Isabel. Sally had reason to resent her memory, but she couldn't. All she felt was pity.

  And then photographs. Over the years Frederick had taken several pictures of Jim, many more of Sally; but there was no picture of him. Webster couldn't even remember taking one. He'd lived surrounded by cameras, lenses, plates, emulsions, and no one had made a record of that vivid, laughing face. There wasn't even a drawing.

  And finally herself, and that was the biggest irony of all. She could hardly find words for it; but she knew she'd have to soon.

  Then one day in late April Charles Bertram announced that he'd got a surprise for them. It was a Sunday, mild and fresh and sunny, and he drove them down to Twickenham in a dog cart, refusing to say a word about their destination.

  "You'll see what it is when we get there," was all he'd say.

  It turned out to be an empty house with a large, overgrown garden. The house itself was covered in peeling stucco, but all the windows were intact and the proportions were lovely. It was seventy years old, Charles told them, clean, and dry - and haunted.

  "The owner's a wealthy brewer," he said, unlocking the gate. "He can't let it at any price. Apparently there's a White Lady who wanders the corridors upstairs. She's perfectly harmless, but people do worry. Now - if you'd step this way, lady and gentlemen. . ."

  He opened the double doors into a sunny room overlooking the garden - and there was a table set for lunch, with cold pheasant, salad, wine and fruit.

  "Blimey, Charlie!" Jim said. "Good surprise, mate. Well done."

  "First-class, Charles," said Webster.

  "I sent my man down ahead of us," Charles explained. "Sally?" He held out a chair for her.

  She sat down. "Is it really haunted?"

  "So the landlord claims. He's quite frank about it - I think he's given up expecting to let it. But look at the space!" he went on, opening the wine.

  Webster was gazing out into the garden. "Is that an orchard down there?" he said. "And there's enough room on the grass there for. . . I wonder. . ."

  "Rails," said Charles. "Parallel with the wall there, you see?"

  Webster looked where he was pointing. "Yes - a proper set-up.We could lay 'em as flat as we liked - and the sun's in the right place, too. . ."

  "Roof it over with glass," said Charles. "Then we could use it whatever the weather was like. And there's a lot of space behind the stable - I'll show you after lunch. Room to build a decent studio - and a workshop, too. It'd mean hiring a full-time carpenter, mind you."

  "You said the rent was low?" Sally asked.

  "I've got the figures here. People don't want a ghost at any price."

  "She's probably bored," said Jim. "We'll give her a job of work to do."

  After they'd eaten, Charles said, "Sally - I've got something for you. It's probably not the right time, but there we are. I found it the other day. I thought you ought to have it."

  He took an envelope from his pocket.

  "I took it three or four months ago," he said. "We'd got a new lens for the Voigtlander, and there was no one else around to try it on, so I asked Frederick. . ."

  She opened the envelope - and there he was.

  It was a full-length portrait, wonderfully sharp and clear, with all the life and warmth that only Charles, apart from Webster, had seemed able to capture in a subject. Frederick was there - vivid and laughing and tense; it was a miraculous photograph.

  She couldn't speak for tears, but she flung her arms around Charles's neck and kissed him instead.

  "Thank you," she said when she could speak; "it's the best present I. . ."

  Well, not the best, she thought a little later, on her own in the orchard. The best was impossible. You couldn't bring people back, despite the spiritualists. All that area of things was a mystery, half fraud and half miracle; better leave it alone and stick to real miracles, like photography. A rectangle of black-and-white paper, and it held all that life! She looked at it again, marvelling. It wasn't enough, because it wasn't him; and yet it was, and it would have to do, because it was all the life he had.

  And yet - irony again - it wasn't.

  "Come on," she whispered to the picture, "it's time we told them."

  She found them around the table, discussing the house, the number of rooms, the rental, the possibility of building on, and they made room for her as an equal, a partner.

  She sat down and said, "I think we should take it. It's the best possible place, Charles, it's just what we want. I don't mind the ghost a bit. There's so much room. . . I don't know why I'm saying this. I meant to say something quite different. So I'll say it now. I'm going to have Fred's child. Are you shocked? If he were alive, we'd be married by now. No, of course you're not shocked. There, I've said it. I'm going to have Fred's baby. And that's what I came in to say."

  She was blushing. She set the picture up on the table, leaning it against the wine-bottle. And then she looked at them, Webster first, then Jim, then Charles, and saw the same grin on each of them. Almost as if they'd done something to be
proud of - silly great things.

  "So there," she said.

  Now read the first chapter of the next thrilling Sally Lockhart mystery...

  THE TIGER IN THE WELL

  One sunny morning in the autumn of 1881, Sally Lockhart stood in the garden and watched her little daughter play, and thought that things were good. She was wrong, but she wouldn't know how or why she was wrong for twenty minutes yet. The man who would show her was still finding his way to the house. For the moment she was happy, which was delightful, and she knew she was, which was rare; she was usually too busy to notice.

  She was happy, for one thing, about her home. It was a large place in Twickenham called Orchard House - a Regency building, open and airy, with iron balconies and a glass-roofed veranda facing the garden. The garden itself, enclosed by a mellow brick wall, consisted of a wide, sunny lawn with some flower-beds and a vine and a fig-tree against the wall on one side, and the group of old apple and plum trees at the bottom which gave the house its name.

  Against the wall on the side opposite the fig-tree a curious structure had been built: glass-roofed like the veranda, but open all the way along, and containing what looked like the track for a large model railway, supported on trestles about three feet high. It had been built to shelter some experiments in the photography of motion, and there was more work to do on it, but it would wait until her friends came back.

  Her friends: she was happy in her friends. Webster Garland, sixty-five, a photographer and her partner in Garland and Lockhart, the firm that joined their names, and Jim Taylor, at twenty, two or three years younger than herself, were all she had for a family. They shared the house, they'd shared adventures; they were Bohemian, they were unrespectable, they were staunch and faithful, and at the moment they were in South America. Every few years, Webster Garland gave in to the urge to wander into some wild part of the world and photograph it. This time, Jim had gone with him; so Sally was on her own.

  But not really alone. There was the staff - and that was something else she was happy with - Ellie the maid, and Mrs Perkins the cook-housekeeper, and Roberts who looked after the garden and the horses. And there was the photography shop in Church Street, where she went once a week to look over the accounts. And there was her own business in the City: a financial consultancy which she'd built up successfully against the expectations of everyone who thought that women couldn't do that sort of thing, or shouldn't if they wanted to remain feminine, or wouldn't if there wasn't something wrong with them. She'd become so busy that she'd recently had to take on a partner: a dry, ironical young woman called Margaret Haddow, a graduate and a feminist like herself. And, finally, there was the nurse she'd engaged to help her with the child: Sarah-Jane Russell, eighteen, competent, kindly, and in love (without his knowledge, or anyone else's) with Jim Taylor.