The Tick of Death (8 page)

They were wearing canvas shoes and coming fast in his direction along the deck. There was no time to take in the rest of the figure, but Cribb was in no doubt that it would be armed with some offensive instrument and he did not propose to present his still-sore head for further attention. Remaining in the crouched position, he tucked his right forearm between shins and deck and rolled rapidly over in the path of the advancing feet. It was like projecting a barrel down a ramp. The impact bowled the feet from under the figure and it crashed over Cribb’s back. He threw himself upon it to crush any retaliatory move, but he need not have bothered. The body was inert.

Cribb examined the man—the ship’s caretaker, he assumed—and found with relief that he was breathing, but unconscious. Probably his head had made connexion with the bulwark on the way down; a fortunate circumstance, because it went against the grain to commit violent assault upon a man who was simply trying to do his duty, albeit with a particularly ugly-looking belaying-pin. Cribb did not pause to moralise longer, but set about tying the hands and feet of the caretaker with the rope he had brought. As he finished the job, Malone’s head appeared above the bulwark. ‘What happened?’ he asked Cribb in a stage whisper, then saw the caretaker on the deck and exclaimed, ‘Moses! You’re a sharp mover. We were supposed to tackle the bugger together.’ He heaved himself on to the deck, leaned over to signal to the launch that all was well, picked up the belaying-pin and wrenched a hasp and padlock from the hatch with prodigious ease. Cribb was thankful he had dealt with the caretaker himself. He might so easily have become a party to murder.

Malone swung back the hatch and descended a ladder into the hold.

‘Can you see all right?’ Cribb inquired into the darkness.

‘Don’t touch the lanterns!’ Malone cautioned in a whisper that was probably heard on Canvey Island. ‘It’s here, by Jesus. Crates of the stuff. You’d better come down.’

Cribb obeyed, and when his eyes adjusted sufficiently for him to find a way between rows of boxes stacked three high, he joined Malone, who was already pushing one towards him.

‘Half-hundredweight crates, just as she said,’ he told Cribb. ‘Take the other end, will you? We can’t be too careful with this stuff.’

They shuffled along the aisle to the ladder and by degrees got the crate on deck. In the moonlight, the mark of the Nobel Explosives Company was clearly visible on the lid under a
Danger-Explosives
warning.

‘There’s some lettering here,’ said Malone. ‘
N.G.75.
Is it a code, at all, d’you reckon?’

‘Seventy-five per cent nitro-glycerine,’ explained Cribb.

‘Holy Father! All this lot and only one caretaker! It’s a public scandal!’

‘Report it to your Member of Parliament,’ Cribb suggested dryly. ‘Hadn’t we better collect the other crates meanwhile?’

They returned to their removals and within a short time had the full consignment of six ready for loading on to the launch. Malone appeared quite breathless at the end, a development which could hardly be put down to want of strength. Cribb could think of only one explanation: the man’s nerves were troubling him. Strange, for a dynamiter. Perhaps the knowledge of what a little of the stuff could do made him uncomfortable in the presence of so much. His hands were definitely trembling as he passed his length of rope around the first crate to secure it for the descent.

Cribb peered over the side. Devlin, below, returned his wave. For stability, Malone wound the loose end of his rope once around the ship’s rail and pulled it taut. ‘You’d better hold the line,’ he told Cribb. ‘I’ll lift the crate carefully over. Be ready to take the strain when I tell you, for God’s sake.’ He picked up the crate as if it were a sleeping baby and gently lowered it over the side. ‘Now!’

It was less difficult to control than Cribb expected, possibly because Malone was draped over the rail steadying the rope. Less than half a minute later came the easing of tension that meant it had arrived on the launch. Devlin released the rope and they repeated the operation with the second crate.

The third was the one that transformed everything. It was halfway down its twenty-foot descent when something— a turbulence in the water, or a moment’s loss of concentration by the handlers—started it swinging. There was a sickening thud as it hit the side of the hulk, followed by another, less powerful. ‘God in Heaven!’ Malone suddenly shrieked in alarm. ‘It’s slipping the rope!’ Half a hundredweight of dynamite was going to crash on to the deck of the launch and he was manifestly unwilling to wait for the result. He had scrambled over the railing and hit the water before Cribb, still holding his line, felt the loss of resistance indicating that the crate was no longer at the other end of it. A stifled scream from Rossanna was overtaken by a crash and the sound of splitting timber. Nothing worse.

Somewhere nearby, voices were shouting questions into the night. Malone’s cry of panic had raised the guardians of the other hulks. Cribb crossed to where the grapnel still supported the line he had used to board the
Moravia,
and let himself down with a little less elegance than in his military heyday. The shattered crate had spilled cartridges of dynamite over the deck of the launch. Devlin had been knocked aside and was picking himself up.

‘Are you fit?’ Cribb asked.

‘I think so.’

‘Get to the wheel then and get under way. I’ll see to this.’

‘Is it safe to handle?’ asked Rossanna, coming from the cabin.

‘Yes,’ said Cribb, ‘but I must move the pieces away from the engine-room. One spark . . .’

‘I’ll help you.’

The shouting on the sister ships continued. Someone was using a lantern to flash signals to Canvey Island.

Devlin raised the funnel and the launch throbbed into life. A shout close at hand distracted Cribb. Malone, his mop of hair flattened seal-like to his head, was trying to clamber aboard.

‘He can hold on,’ said Rossanna, but Cribb thought otherwise and moved to give assistance. The waterlogged hammer-thrower was four times as heavy as the crates and quite a different undertaking, but by brute strength and simple mechanics Cribb engineered him into a position where he could topple over on to the deck.

The launch weaved between two hulks and made for the open river, listing precariously as Devlin swung the wheel. Rossanna helped Cribb cover the crates with a tarpaulin. A voice was appealing to them through a megaphone to declare their identity, even though it was fast becoming obvious that they were not much interested in replying. The caretakers’ isolation in their different vessels had brought an encouraging element of confusion to the scene. The coastguards, when they came from Canvey, would get half-a-dozen conflicting accounts of the raid.

Cribb joined the others in the cabin. Malone had shed most of his sodden clothes and was getting dry by shovelling coke into the boiler. ‘Once we clear the Haven we’ll have a flood tide with us,’ called Devlin. ‘No one’s going to overtake us then.’

‘They may not overtake us, Patrick,’ said Rossanna, ‘but if someone has the wit to use the telegraph, there could be a coastguard launch coming to meet us from Gravesend. If we get home tonight, it will be more than we deserve. And I do not relish telling my father that his plans were frustrated by a shameful exhibition of panic.’

‘We got some dynamite,’ said Devlin in mitigation.

‘Less than half the amount we came for.’

‘The crate was slipping,’ said Malone defensively. ‘It might have blown us all sky-high.’

‘And who was supposed to have secured it?’ Rossanna demanded in a fury. ‘Are you admitting to incompetence as well as funk? Did Mr Sargent here scream like a schoolgirl and jump into the water? No, he kept his head.’

‘Rossanna, don’t get in a wax,’ said Devlin. ‘We’ll think of something to tell your father.’

Cribb wondered what. It would be disturbingly easy for Devlin to shield Malone by blaming the newcomer for the imperfections in the expedition. He hoped he could rely on Rossanna.

When the launch headed towards the Lower Hope and began to make swifter progress, the tension aboard eased perceptibly. Malone borrowed Devlin’s coat and went forward to keep watch for any sign of a coastguard boat. Rossanna drew her shawl moodily about her and went aft.

‘Ah, that’s a fine woman,’ Devlin said to Cribb in the cordial vein of their conversation at Lillie Bridge, as if any unpleasantness between them was forgotten, ‘but she bears the devil of a lot of responsibility. It doesn’t do to cross her when she’s implementing her father’s plans. Since the accident, she and McGee have grown very close. Understandably. She was always sympathetic to the cause, but it didn’t go to anything more adventurous than joining the Ladies’ Land League until McGee practically blew his head off trying to make a clock-timed machine. It looked as though the whole campaign had foundered before it had got under way. He’s the brains, you understand. Malone and I are very minor in the organisation. Then word came from New York that we were to take our orders from Rossanna, she being able to interpret her father’s statements to us.’

‘But it isn’t always practical for McGee to be present,’ Cribb observed, ‘and who gives the orders then?’ He knew the answer, but he was interested in Devlin’s reaction to the question.

‘She’s every bit as forceful as her father,’ said Devlin. ‘I don’t know whether it’s the Irish blood or the red hair, or both, but she gets her way, Mr Sargent, she gets her way.’

‘Pardon me for smiling,’ said Cribb. ‘It’s a queer sight to an outsider—two sturdy fellows like yourself and Malone taking orders from a slip of a girl like that. I should have thought one of you might have had his hand around her waist by now. Isn’t she susceptible to manly charm?’

‘I told you,’ said Devlin. ‘She’s devoted to her father. It might be difficult for you to apprehend, but there it is. Besides, Malone and I are here to do a job. There’ll be women enough when we get home.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Cribb. ‘Believe me, I wasn’t questioning your loyalty to the cause, or your manhood. I was merely curious to know why Miss McGee has just gone forward to join Malone.’

He got his answer within seconds. It came in the form of a pistol-shot that echoed across the waters of the Lower Hope.

‘Lord! Has she gone mad?’ exclaimed Cribb. He left the cabin and ran to where she stood with smoke still rising from the revolver in her hand. Malone lay dead at her feet.

‘Get him over the side, Mr Sargent,’ she told Cribb matter-of-factly. ‘Ireland has no need of cowards.’

Cribb had never been so close to murder. Constable Bottle had died like this. Perhaps Thackeray. So incensed was he that he acted instinctively, regardless of how an agent of the crown conducted himself. He wrenched the gun from her grasp, flung it down and took her by the shoulders. ‘That was a lunatic thing to do, Miss McGee, a monstrous, callous act. I’ll not demean myself by throwing insults at a woman, but, by God, I know what you are now, and what you deserve. Get below, before I thrash you.’

CHAPTER
8

‘NOBODY EVER SPOKE TO me like that except my father,’ said Rossanna as she heaped devilled kidneys on to Cribb’s plate. It was 6 a.m., and he was seated at a bare wooden table in the kitchen of the dynamiters’ house. Much against his expectation, they had passed through Gravesend Reach and got back without further incident. Devlin, with the strain of the night’s doings written on his face, had gone straight to bed. Rossanna had confounded Cribb by meekly offering to cook him breakfast before they retired.

The first shock of Malone’s sudden dispatch had passed. It had been the fact of murder more than any sentiment about the hammer-thrower’s going that had prompted Cribb to react so impulsively. Malone had not been one of the most endearing representatives of his race, and it had been more fatiguing than distressing consigning him to the Thames. There had been time after that, as the launch steamed homeward, to consider how a secret agent might recover from such a lapse.

‘You were absolutely right, of course,’ Rossanna continued. ‘I should never have fired the shot. I didn’t give a thought for the dynamite on board. Ridiculous! I might have killed us all.’

‘You understood my reason for speaking to you so strongly, then?’ said Cribb, with resource.

‘Graphically, Mr Sargent. I am at a loss to understand how you exercised such restraint. I deserved nothing less than the chastisement you were ready to inflict on me.’

An exceptional development. Far from the hostile reaction he had expected, she seemed to have warmed towards him.

‘Aren’t you going to have some kidneys, Miss McGee?’

‘I wasn’t intending to—but if I might be so bold as to take one from your plate, it would give an opportunity of talking to you a little longer.’

‘Please help yourself.’

She gave a tentative smile, and forked a kidney from his plate. Then she sat opposite him, turning the fork speculatively in front of her face. ‘You were magnificent tonight, Mr Sargent. I shall be reporting favourably to my father.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Cribb.

‘Do you know what most impressed me? It was when you remained completely calm when the crate fell. Nine men out of ten in your position would have followed Malone into the river. Panic is extremely contagious.’

‘You’re right,’ said Cribb. ‘We were in more danger from ourselves at that moment than we were from the crate. Dynamite can’t be exploded by ordinary concussion, and that’s been proved. There were tests carried out some years ago in Wales—Glynrhonwy Quarry, Llanberis. Half-hundredweight crates were dropped repeatedly 130 feet on to broken shingle and none of them exploded. Then they dropped a box filled with two hundredweight of slate rubbish on to a crate of dynamite. Same result. It requires a sharp, smart blow on a thin coating of the stuff between two pieces of iron to set it off. The nitro-glycerine which it contains has no means of escape from the effect of the blow.’ His tutors at Woolwich would have been proud. Rossanna looked slightly bemused.

‘So that was why you kept a cool head?’

‘In a nutshell, miss. I’ve got a strong instinct for survival, but I don’t like getting wet unnecessarily.’

‘Do you know why I shot Malone?’

‘Because he panicked?’

‘Yes—and because he was of no further use to us. There was nothing he could do that
you
could not do equally well. Perhaps better.’

She eyed him with such intensity over the fork that he decided it was time to divert the conversation. ‘I’m not much good at hammer-throwing.’

‘Nor was he. Paddy Devlin is the hammer-thrower. Malone needed an alibi, being Irish-American. You don’t. When we’ve all had some rest, I’ll tell Papa of the part you played tonight. I don’t think he’ll entertain doubts about you much longer.’ She began fingering the fastening at the back of her hair. ‘It’s time I was in bed, Mr Sargent. I’m suddenly quite tired. But not displeased. I hope you are not.’ On cue, her hair cascaded over her shoulders, gleaming red and gold in the early morning sun.

‘On the contrary,’ said Cribb spiritedly.

‘Might I ask one favour of you before I go—to share a secret with me? I told Patrick that Malone turned the gun on himself tonight—from shame, you see—and I shall tell my father the same. I don’t deserve it, but
please
may I count on you?’

Cribb gave a solemn nod.

CONSIDERING HIS SITUATION, he slept well, disturbed only by occasional unfamiliar sounds from the drive below his window. The latest of these, the rasp of carriage-wheels, drew him from bed. From between the curtains, he watched the manservant struggling to unload a portmanteau from the roof of the four-wheeler. One portmanteau was much like another, but Cribb was privately satisfied it was the one he had seen and left alone in Malone’s room in the Alcazar Hotel. Someone had been remarkably quick to take account of the night’s events.

He turned from the window. There was sufficient light without drawing the curtain to permit a more thorough examination of the room than he had made on being shown into it eight hours before. The shape was determined by one of the twin gables fronting the house; a man of his height had to keep to the middle or duck his head. But it was still furnished more lavishly than any police section-house he had slept in. Discipline in the Force was not to be undermined by brass bedsteads with feather mattresses, marble washstands and Turkish carpets. Cribb did not feel threatened by a few creature comforts. Not even a dressing-table.

It stood in the corner farthest from the door, white in colour, with sprays of forget-me-nots painted on it. The skirt of white muslin that should have been suspended from the edge of the table-top had been removed, perhaps out of regard for the feelings of the new occupant, and the legs underneath looked disturbingly exposed. There was a square mirror above, with adjacent flanking mirrors. Cribb approached to a position where he could see himself in triplicate. The profile on the left, he decided, had a shade more of the dynamiter in it than the full face or the opposite profile, particularly when he pushed his lower lip forward. It was still difficult to think of himself as Malone’s replacement. He decided to look again when he had changed out of his borrowed nightshirt. Some clothes had thoughtfully been left out for him.

There was a cold luncheon waiting when he got downstairs and found the dining room. The factotum served it without a word, and withdrew, leaving him to help himself to cheese and fruit. He enjoyed an unhurried meal, and ventured through the adjoining conservatory into the garden. Noticeably overgrown lawns sloped from the house to an orchard, beyond which gleamed the Thames. Hearing a slight cough, he strolled in that direction.

‘Ah, Mr Sargent,’ said Rossanna. ‘I was wondering whether we should see you. You feel refreshed. I hope?’

‘Famously, thank you, miss.’

‘Please call me Rossanna.’ She spoke from a hammock slung low between two apple-trees. Dappled sunshine played over her gently oscillating form, dressed for the afternoon in ivory-coloured cotton lawn, trimmed with lace. Her father sat nearby in his invalid chair, a wide-brimmed straw hat angled so that it obscured the top of his mask, without interfering with his vision. ‘And have you taken lunch?’

‘I have, thank you.’

She smiled in that way that, rightly or wrongly, seemed charged with ulterior meanings. ‘Then you cannot possibly have anything to do but talk to me. It is time we got to know you better, don’t you agree? If you go back to the conservatory, you will find a cane chair. Bring it out in the sunshine, Mr Sargent, and place it just there under the tree, where we both can see you.’

He was not deceived by the casual charm of the invitation, nor the setting. Every move he had made since coming downstairs had been artfully contrived to get him into the garden in a compliant frame of mind. She had staged it all: the solitary meal, the open door into the garden, the cough to catch his attention, McGee silently present, herself indolently posed in the hammock, waiting for him. It was different only in detail from being dragged struggling into a room and roped to a chair. The interrogation in the next two hours was no less searching or persistent. Her thoroughness in extracting every detail of his story would have provided an object-lesson for any aspirant to detective work. The Clan-na-Gael was not proposing to admit a novice to its ranks without first sifting his personal history over and over for the possibility of deception.

Cribb, for his part, was not unprepared. He had decided to apply a principle that had served him well in his selection interview for the C.I.D. six years before. He would give so much prominence to the things his questioner wanted to hear that anything adverse would be crowded out. Of course, it was difficult crowding out an entire career in the Force, as distinct from a few minor insubordinations, but the principle was there. After a substantially accurate account of his childhood, he waxed eloquent about his army days, making three years sound like the greater part of his life. From there, he moved deftly on to his career as a mercenary, careful not to include any detail that could betray him. His knowledge of dynamite, he explained, was gained in Paris, in service with the anarchist movement. The names of Kropotkin and Malatesta rolled from his tongue as naturally as the words of the official caution to prisoners—thanks to some profitable reading at Woolwich. In 1882, he said, he had severed his links with the
Black International,
after the arrests of Cyvogt and Kropotkin, and returned to London.

If Cribb thought his recital was over, Rossanna did not. She continued to press him for more information, verifying dates, names and places. The questions followed no logical sequence, but tested his story at every conceivable point. He was forced to take chances, and more than once faltered and desperately hoped she and father would put it down to lapses of memory.

‘Thank you, Mr Sargent,’ she finally said. ‘You must think me the most inquisitive woman alive.’

‘Good Lord, no, miss,’ Cribb gallantly replied. ‘Anyone in your father’s position is entitled to make reasonable inquiries about a person in his employment, and I’m sure you were putting the questions on his behalf. I’m a professional man. I don’t object to such procedures.’

She smiled. ‘Then you will understand that I must now confer with my father. Would you be so kind as to help me to the ground?’

He took her hands and drew her forward. She swung her legs clear of the hammock and stood upright, so that he felt the touch of her dress against his legs. He made to take a discreet step back, but she continued to hold his hands, momentarily detaining him. ‘You are more than kind,’ she said, and then went to McGee.

When the dumb-language was done, Cribb saw with satisfaction that her expression was still friendly. ‘Father has asked me to take him indoors now,’ she told him, ‘but there are things I must say to you, important things. If you will wait here for me, we can take a turn around the garden in a few minutes.’

Leaning there against the apple-tree while Rossanna wheeled the invalid chair towards the house, Cribb tried to account for the peculiar effect he seemed to have on her. A man the wrong side of forty needed to guard against miscalculations where young women were concerned, but he was strongly of the opinion that she was making overtures to him. It was not the sort of thing one was accustomed to, working for the Yard. He supposed adventurers encountered it more often, by the nature of their work. That rope-ascent the previous night had been a stirring demonstration of agility, he was bound to admit. Yet he would have thought the brutal dressing down he gave the girl after she shot Malone would have put a stop to any sentimental stirrings. Not at all: it seemed to have stimulated them. The breakfast she had cooked him, the unpinning of her hair, the invitation to use her Christian name had not indicated much hostility or resentment. Nor had the business beside the hammock.

The odd thing was that Devlin had given the impression that the girl was exclusively devoted to her father. The presence of two strapping young athletes in the house had not moved her in the least. One way of accounting for it was that she was play-acting, coldly and deliberately putting the recruit through some kind of test. The only other explanation Cribb could supply was that she was one of those unusual members of her sex uninterested in young men, preferring to submit to the authority of older, more masterful partners. To such women, a reprimand was an affirmation of affection. He pulled a leaf off the tree and thoughtfully dissected it.

She came across the lawn again in a muslin shawl she had not been wearing before. ‘Being so near the river, we get droves of gnats and flies invading the garden late in the afternoon,’ she explained. ‘It invites disaster to walk about with one’s arms exposed.’ She linked her left hand lightly and naturally under his right forearm and they set off slowly in the direction of the river-bank. ‘Do you know what impressed Father most about your story? You made no claim at all to be a patriot of Ireland. That would have been the most obvious way to curry favour with us.’

‘I told you,’ said Cribb in his most masterful manner, ‘I’m a mercenary. A professional adventurer. I don’t care a tinker’s damn for Ireland unless the money’s right.’

‘It will be. Tell me, Mr Sargent, have you ever heard of the Skirmishing Fund?’

Cribb shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have.’

‘Then I must educate you. It is a sum of money which has been raised in America by public subscription, to finance the skirmishing of England until Ireland gains her freedom. It was started some years ago in the columns of a New York newspaper, the
Irish World,
by Diarmuid O’Donovan—the Rossa, as he is known.’

‘The Fenian,’ said Cribb.

‘The same. We don’t talk much of Fenians now, Mr Sargent. They were totally discredited when the Rising failed in 1867. Imagine the incompetence of an organisation which postpones its revolution and fails to get the information to County Kerry! The men of Kerry had captured a coastguard station and a police barracks before they discovered their mistake and had to be sent home. And when the Rising did take place three weeks later it was in a blinding snowstorm and never looked like succeeding. You may still hear talk of Fenians, but the organisation is dead. There is only one revolutionary body of any importance, and that was founded in 1869, when most of the Fenians were in prison. Clan-na-Gael is its name.’