The Railway Viaduct (9 page)

Before he reported the death of Gaston Chabal to the police, and left them to track down his family, Colbeck wanted to visit the address that Thomas Brassey had given him for the late engineer. The detective hoped to find out a little more about the man on his own account. Once the French police were involved, he would have to surrender the initiative to them. The address was in the Marais, one of the oldest and most interesting parts of the city, and it took its name from the marshes on which it was built. When the cab pulled up in a busy street, he saw that the dead man had owned a tall, narrow house with a hint of Gothic extravagance in its façade. It was large enough to require servants, so Colbeck could expect someone to be at home.

He alighted from the cab and was immediately reminded how much taller he was than the average Frenchman. Most of those who bustled past him were distinctly shorter and had darker complexions. From the hostile glances he was given, Colbeck could see that the passers-by had guessed his nationality. He pulled the bell rope and heard it ring deep
inside the house. The door was soon opened by a pretty young woman with a look of hope and expectation in her eyes. When she saw that a stranger had called, she let out a sigh.

Colbeck thought that she could be no more than sixteen or seventeen. It was clear from her manner and her elegance that she was no servant. Since he had been informed that Chabal was unmarried, he assumed that she might be a relative of his. Breaking the sad news to her would be painful but it had to be done. Lifting his hat in a gesture of courtesy, Colbeck gave a smile.

‘
Bonjour,
Mademoiselle
,’ he said.

‘
Madame
,’ she corrected.

‘
Ah
.’ He looked down and saw her wedding ring.

‘
Vous êtes un ami de Gaston
?’ she asked.

It was an awkward question and Colbeck did not wish to answer it on a doorstep when people were walking past all the time. Since he had bad tidings to impart, he needed to do so in privacy. He reached for a polite euphemism.

‘
J’ai fait sa connaissance.
’

‘
C’est mon marie
.’

Colbeck was shaken. He was talking to Gaston Chabal’s wife.

Victor Leeming had been startled when first given the assignment, but he had adapted to the notion very quickly. He was very pleased to be directly involved in the business of detection again. Strong enough to do the work, he also had the facial characteristics to pass as a navvy. For once, his ugliness was a positive advantage. Wearing moleskin trousers, double-canvas shirt, velveteen square-tailed coat, hobnail boots and a mud-spattered felt hat with the brim turned up, he looked
almost indistinguishable from the rest of the men. Like them, he even wore a gaudy handkerchief at his neck to add some colour.

Railway work covered a wide variety of skills, each trade commanding a different wage. Leeming met carpenters, blacksmiths, miners, quarrymen, masons, bricklayers, horse keepers and sawyers. Taken on as a navvy, he was responsible to a ganger, a huge man with the rasping tongue and bulging muscularity needed to keep such an unruly group of workers in order. Digging, loading, cutting and tipping were the navvies’ traditional tasks. Unskilled work was left to the labourers. Leeming was a cut above them.

When they were building a railway in England, navvies had an allowance of two pounds of beef and a gallon of beer a day. Since they had been in France, however, they had discovered that brandy was cheaper than beer and more potent. It had become the drink of choice for many of them. The fact that they spent their money so freely in the local inns made them more acceptable to the indigenous population. Given a shovel, Leeming was ordered to load spoil into wagons. It was hard, tiring, repetitive work but he did it without complaint. Those alongside him were largely Irish and they tended to work in silence. A group of Welsh navvies further down the line, however, insisted on singing hymns as they used pick and shovel on the rocky ground.

‘Will you listen to those bastards?’ said Liam Kilfoyle, during a brief rest. ‘They never stop.’

‘I’m surprised they’ve got the breath to sing,’ observed Leeming.

‘They’ll work all day, fuck all night and sing their heads off while they’re doing both. It’s unnatural, that’s what it is.’

‘They sound happy enough.’

‘Little things please little bloody minds.’

Kilfoyle was a tall, stringy individual in his twenties with a pair of small, darting eyes in a face that reminded Leeming of a weasel. The sergeant had gone out of his way to befriend the young Irishman, feeding him the story that Brassey had prepared for his new recruit. The problem was that Leeming could only understand half of what Kilfoyle said because the latter kept using colloquialisms that were peculiar to the Irish. He knew the rhyming slang of the London underworld by heart but this was quite different. When in doubt as to his companion’s meaning, he simply nodded. Kilfoyle seemed amiable enough. Putting his shovel aside, he undid his trousers and urinated against the wheel of a wagon, breaking wind loudly in the process. He did up his moleskin trousers again.

‘Have you worked for Mr Brassey before?’ said Kilfoyle.

‘No – what’s he like?’

‘He’s a fair man and you’ll not find too many of them in this line of business. Some contractors are bloody tyrants, so they are. Real bloodsuckers. Not our Mr Brassey. His only fault is that he won’t allow beer to be sold on site. Shovelling earth is thirsty work.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ said Leeming, face and armpits streaming with sweat. ‘My throat’s as dry as a bone.’

‘Mine, too.’ Kilfoyle eyed him up and down. ‘So where have you worked, Victor?’

‘On the London to Brighton.’

‘From what I heard, there were some really good fights there.’

‘There were, Liam. We were at it hammer and tongs many a time. I’ve got friends who are still locked up in Lewes Prison
because of a riot we caused. They had to call in the troops.’

‘It was the same for us when we were building the Chester and Holyhead. A gang of mad Welsh bricklayers from Bangor attacked us and said that all Irish were thieves and rogues. We’d have murdered the buggers, if the soldiers hadn’t stopped our fun. You look as if you could handle yourself in a fight,’ he went on, noting the size of Leeming’s forearms. ‘Am I right?’

‘I won’t let anyone push me around.’

‘Then you’re one of us.’ After slapping the other on the back, he picked up his shovel. ‘What do you think of the French?’

‘I don’t like them, Liam.’

‘Turd-faced sons of diseased whores!’

‘It’s that gibberish they speak.’

‘They hate us, Victor.’

‘I know. They see us as invaders.’

‘That’s why they’re trying to stop us,’ said Kilfoyle, angrily. ‘That explosion last night was set off by those French fucking navvies, sure it was. Well, some of us are not going to let these greasy, bloody foreigners drive us away. We’re going to strike back.’

‘Strike back?’ repeated Leeming, trying to keep the note of alarm out of his voice. ‘And who is we, Liam?’

‘The sons of Erin.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘We’ll attack their camp tonight and kick their pox-ridden arses all the way from here back to Paris. Are you with us, Victor?’

‘I’m not Irish.’

‘A strong arm and a stout heart is all we ask.’

‘Tonight, you say? When and where?’

‘That doesn’t matter. Are you with us or are you not?’

Leeming had no choice in the matter. If he refused, he would earn Kilfoyle’s derision and be ostracised by the rest of the Irish navvies. If that happened, he would find out nothing. He simply had to appear willing.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said with conviction. ‘I’m with you, Liam.’

‘Good man!’

They started working in earnest beside each other again.

‘Married?’ said Thomas Brassey, rising from his seat in surprise. ‘I always thought that Gaston was a roving bachelor.’

‘That was the impression that he liked to give,’ confirmed Colbeck, ‘and it obviously convinced some ladies. I now know of two seduced by him and there may be well be more. He seems to have been liberal with his affections.’

‘That raises the possibility that Gaston was the victim of an enraged husband, Inspector.’

‘But it is only a possibility, sir.’

Robert Colbeck had returned from Paris late that afternoon and called in at Brassey’s office to report his findings. The contractor was fascinated to hear what he had learned.

‘What did you think of Paris?’ he asked.

‘It’s a beautiful city, so cultured, so exciting, so urbane.’ He held up a small book. ‘Do you know Galignani’s work? This is a
Stranger’s Guide through the French Metropolis
. I bought it on my first visit there several years ago. It’s a veritable goldmine of information. I only wish I’d had time to visit some of the sights he recommends.’

‘How did Gaston’s wife take the news?’

‘She almost fainted. Naturally, I suppressed most of the
details. There’s no need for her to know any of those. Nor did I tell what her husband was doing in England. That would have been cruel.’

‘What had he said to her?’

‘That he was going to London to deliver a lecture.’

‘And she had no suspicion that another woman was involved?’

‘None at all, Mr Brassey,’ said Colbeck. ‘She’s young, innocent and very trusting. His death was a devastating blow to her. Luckily, her mother was staying at the house. She was able to comfort her.’

‘That’s something, anyway.’

‘I didn’t wish to trespass on private grief any longer so I left.’

‘Did you go to the police?’

‘Yes,’ said Colbeck, ‘I gave them a full report of the murder and told them that we were devoting all our resources to the arrest of the killer. They agreed to help in any way, a fact that Mr Tallis will no doubt treat as a phenomenon.’

‘Mr Tallis?’

‘My superintendent. He has a very low opinion of the French.’

‘Oh, they’re a civilised nation at bottom,’ said Brassey with a guarded affection. ‘They make me feel very parochial at times. The trouble is that they are so easily aroused. I was here four years ago when the revolution broke out.’

‘That must have been quite frightening.’

‘It was, Inspector Colbeck. I was in no personal danger but my business interests were. Success as a contractor depends on stability and France became very unstable. When Louis Philippe was swept from the throne, there was a deep financial
crisis.’

‘Yes – many people were ruined.’

‘I could have been one of them,’ admitted Brassey, flicking back his coat tails as he perched on the edge of his desk. ‘Stocks and shares fell heavily, none more so than those of the railways.’ He pulled a face. ‘It was a testing time for us. How much do you know about the French railway system?’

‘I know that it’s far less developed than ours,’ said Colbeck, ‘and that it’s never attracted anything like the private investment that we enjoy. For that reason, the French government has had to play more of a role – and that’s all very well until you have a violent change of government.’

‘It’s made this project so much more difficult.’

‘Do the government interfere?’

‘I’m answerable to the Minister of Public Works and he expects to be kept up to date with our progress. That was why Gaston Chabal was so useful to us – I got him to send regular reports in French. No,’ Brassey continued, ‘our real difficulty lay on the other side of the Channel.’

‘In England?’

‘It’s where so many of our private investors live, Inspector.’

‘I see.’

‘Ten years ago, they were happy to put money into a venture of this kind, knowing that they’d get an excellent return on their capital. After the revolution, they were much more reluctant. One of them told me that the trouble with the French was that they were
too
French.’

‘Emotional, unreliable and prone to overthrow governments.’

‘The gentleman in question put it more bluntly than that.
Mark you,’ said Brassey, ‘not all the British investors turned tail. Some had the foresight to see that this railway could pay handsome dividends in time. One of them had the sense to come here to see for himself.’

‘Oh?’ said Colbeck. ‘Who was that?’

‘Alexander Marklew. He understands railways.’

‘And he’s actually been here?’

‘In the very early stages,’ replied the other. ‘I let Gaston Chabal talk to him about the potential of this railway. He had such a persuasive tongue. He managed to persuade Mr Marklew to invest. He also showed him and his wife around Paris – I think that helped.’

‘I’m sure that it did.’

Colbeck said nothing about the liaison with Hannah Marklew but it took on a slightly different aspect now. He suspected that part of the reason Chabal had cultivated the lady was to persuade her to urge her husband to buy shares in the railway. The intimacies of the bedroom were not without a commercial significance.

‘Clearly,’ said Colbeck, ‘you were able to raise the finance.’

‘Yes, Inspector, but the government remains our paymaster. They’ve built a whole series of time penalties into the contract. That’s why these setbacks are so annoying,’ said Brassey, pursing his lips. ‘They slow us down and cost us a lot of money.’ He saw someone through the window. ‘Ah, here’s Aubrey.’ He crossed to the door to open it. ‘Come on in,’ he said. ‘This is Inspector Colbeck.’

‘How do you do, sir?’ said Filton.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Colbeck, shaking his hand. ‘I believe that you talked earlier to Sergeant Leeming.’

‘Yes. I’ve just come from him.’

‘Oh?’

‘Now that he’s working in disguise, of course, I did not disclose the fact that I knew him. But, as I walked past, he slipped this into my hand.’ He gave a note to Brassey. ‘It’s for you, sir.’

‘Thank you, Aubrey.’ Brassey unfolded the note and read it. He then offered it to Colbeck. ‘I think you should see this, Inspector.’

‘Why?’

‘More trouble ahead.’

‘Really?’ Colbeck took the note from him.

‘We’re going to have a fight on our hands.’