The Shadow in the North (29 page)

"Her client," said Jim. "The one she lost the money for . . . in Bellmanns 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. Were all square now. I meant me. Oh, Christ, this leg, I dont know what I mean. I'm worried, Mackinnon. I think she's going to .. ."

He groaned again and rocked to and fro in his agony. The flask, nearly empty now, took a trembling journey to his lips, 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 ofT 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 both of them

with the other as they hastened down the gravel path toward 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 yellow 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 toward 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; j 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 doorT was rolled back in place, he helped her step up onto a platform overlooking the length of the building, 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 farthest one was still only a chassis, but she could see the massive iron framework that 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 pipe work, too intricate for the eye to penetrate, with a trav-ehng 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 center 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 leaned down to lift 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, labeled chambers one through 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 perfealy."

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

"Oh, no. In the very center. 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 swiveling 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,

Power and Service 343

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 that 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 the false chimney on top. He can see all around, three hundred and sixty degrees, a perfect view, by swiveling 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 pipe work, 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 fi-om 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 hands 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, took 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 candlelight, 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 honor. 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 toward 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 Fd 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 Mackinnons 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 leaped 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 fiirther 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 the 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 Mackinnons shoulder.

"Come on," he said, "they're opening the gate, look—^we'U 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 afi:er him.

There followed three hours of ftiry. Three hours of tearing at fallen beams, of flinging aside twisted pieces of metal and broken bricks and shattered fragments of wood, of burned 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 the supply that was 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 center 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; and 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.

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 low, waving his arm and pointing 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 blond 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. ..."

I

"Jim?" she whispered. She opened her €:ycs 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.

cJ ke LJrckard

It was only because Sally had been standing in the passageway, and because 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.