Lord Kelvin's Machine

PART II

THE DOWNED SHIPS: JACK OWLESBY’S ACCOUNT





THE HANSOM CAB LUNATIC


I was coming along down Holborn Hill in December, beneath a lowering sky and carrying a tin of biscuits and a pound of Brazilian coffee, when a warehouse exploded behind Perkins inn. Smoke and lumber and a twisted sheet of iron, torn nearly in half from the blast, blew out of the mouth of the alley between Kingsway and Newton Street and scattered the half-dozen pedestrians like autumn leaves.

I was clear of it, thank God, but even so the concussion threw me into the gutter, and I dropped the biscuits and coffee and found myself on the seat of my pants, watching a man stagger away from the explosion, out of the mouth of the alley to collapse bloody on the pavement.

I jumped up and ran for the man on the ground, thinking to help but really not thinking at all, when a second blast ripped through and slammed me against a bakery storefront. Glass shattered where my elbow went through the window, and then the rest of me followed, snapping the mullions and tumbling through in an avalanche of buns.

Directly there was another roar—not an explosion this time, but a roof caving in, and then a billow of black smoke pouring out of the alley and a fire that reminded you of the Gordon Riots. I could walk, if you call it that, and between the two of us, the baker and I, we pulled the bloody man across to where my coffee lay spilled out in the gutter. We needn’t have bothered; he was dead, and we could both see it straight off, but you don’t leave even a dead man to burn, not if you can help it.

I couldn’t see worth anything all at once, because of the reek. It was a paper company gone up—a common enough tragedy, except that there was an element or two that made it markedly less common: Mr. Theophilus Godall was there, for one. Maybe you don’t know what that means yet; maybe you do. And the paper company wasn’t just any paper company; it was next door but one to an empty sort of machine works overseen by the Royal Academy, specifically as a sort of closed-to-the-public museum used to house the contrivances built by the great Lord Kelvin and the other inventive geniuses of the Academy.

My name is Jack Owlesby, and I’m a friend of Professor Langdon St. Ives, who is perhaps the greatest, mostly unsung, scientist and explorer in the Western Hemisphere. Mr. Oscar Wilde said something recently along the following lines: “Show me a hero,” he said, “and I will write you a tragedy.” He might have taken St. Ives as a case in point. I’m rather more inclined to enlarge upon the heroism, which is easier, and of which you have a remarkable surplus when you tackle a subject like Langdon St. Ives. You yourself might have read about some few of his exploits; and if you have, then I’ll go as far as to tell you that this business of the exploding paper company won’t turn out in the end to be altogether foreign to you.

As for Theophilus Godall, he owns the Bohemian Cigar Divan in Rupert Street, Soho; but there’s more to the man than that.

Luckily there was a sharp wind blowing down Kingsway toward the Thames, which scoured the smoke skyward almost as soon as it flooded out of the alley, so that the street was clear enough in between billows. The blast brought a crowd, and they didn’t stand and gawk, as crowds have got a reputation for. Two men even tried to get up the alley toward the fire, thinking that there might have been people trapped there or insensible, but the baker stopped them— and a good thing, too, as you’ll see—pointing out quick that this being a Sunday the paper company was closed, as was everything else in that direction except Perkins Inn, which was safe enough for the moment. He had been out for a look, the baker had, not a minute before the explosion, and could tell us that aside from the dead man there hadn’t been a soul dawdling in the alley except a tall gentleman of upright carriage in a greatcoat and top hat.

All of us looked as one down that grim black alley, all of us thinking the same thing—that the man in the coat, if he had in fact been dawdling there, was dead as a nailhead. The two men who had a minute earlier been making a rush in that direction were happy enough that they had held up, for the flames licked across at the brick façade opposite the paper company, and a wide section of wall crumbled outward in a roar of collapsing rubble.

The baker, as if coming to, clapped a hand onto the top of his bald head and sprinted for his own shop—thinking to get some few of his things clear before it went up too. The heat drove him back, though, and I can picture him clearly in my mind today, wringing his hands and scuffing his feet in the spilled coffee next to the dead man, and waiting for his shop to burn.

It didn’t, though; thank heaven. It began to rain, is what it did, with such a crashing of thunder that, with the first bolt, we thought another roof had caved in. The drops fell thick and steady, as if someone were pouring it out of a bucket, and the baker fell to his knees right there in the street and clasped his hands together with the rainwater streaming down his face. I hope he said a word for the dead man behind him—although if he did, it was a brief one, for he stood up just as quick as he had knelt, and pointed across at a man in a greatcoat and hat, walking away in the direction of the river.

He carried a stick, and his profile betrayed an aquiline nose and a noble sort of demeanor—you could see it in his walk—that made him out to be something more than a gentleman: royalty, you’d think, except that his hat and coat had seen some wear, and his trousers were splashed with mud from the street.

The baker shouted. Of course it was the man he’d seen loitering in the alley directly before the blast. And two constables had the man pinned and labeled before he had a chance to run for it. He wouldn’t have run for it anyway, of course, for it was Godall, as you’ve no doubt deduced by now.

I was possessed by the notion that I ought to go to his defense, tell the constables that they’d collared the wrong man. I didn’t, though, having learned a lesson from that earlier unthinking dash of mine into what the newspapers, in their silly way, sometimes call “the devouring elephant,” meaning the fire, and still limping from it, too. They would arrest me along with Godall, is what they would do, as an accomplice. My word is nothing to the constabulary. And I was certain that they wouldn’t keep him two minutes anyway, once they knew who he was.

The rain fell harder, if that were possible, and the flames died away almost as fast as they’d risen, and the fire brigade, when it clanged up, had nothing at all to do but wait. The smoke boiled away, too, on the instant. Just like that. You would have thought there’d be a fresh billow, what with the sudden rain and all, but there wasn’t; it was simply gone, leaving some whitish smoke tumbling up out of the embers of the dwindling fire.

It struck me as funny at the time, the fire and blast so quick and fierce, and then the smoke just dying like that. It’s a consequence of hanging about with men like St. Ives and Godall, I guess, that you jump to conclusions about things; you want everything to be a mystery. No, that’s not quite it: you suspect everything of being a mystery; what you want is a different story, which is to say, no story at all. There was a story in this, though. It took about thirty seconds of thought to conclude that it had been an incendiary bomb and a lot of chemical smoke, which had fairly quickly used itself up. The explosion had to have been manufactured.

My biscuits, it turned out—the tin I’d dropped in the road— had been trampled, and I left for Jermyn Street empty-handed. It’s a good walk in the rain—by that I mean a long one—but it gave me time to think about two things: whether the tragedy that afternoon had anything to do with Lord Kelvin’s machine (the presence of Godall rather argued that it had) and what I would tell Dorothy about it all. Dorothy, if you don’t already know, is my wife, and at the moment she was a wife who wouldn’t be keen on my getting caught up in another of St. Ives’s adventures when the last one hadn’t quite got cold yet. I had the unsettling notion that “caught up” was just the right verb, even if a little on the passive side; this had all the earmarks of that sort of thing.

St. Ives wasn’t in Harrogate, at his laboratory. He was in London paying a visit to my father-in-law—Mr. William Keeble of Jermyn Street, the toy maker and inventor—consulting him on the building of an apparatus that doesn’t concern us here, and is too wild and unlikely for me to mention without throwing a cloud of suspicion and doubt over the whole story. But it was fortuitous, St. Ives’s being in London, because if he hadn’t been I would have had to send a message up to Harrogate, and he would have come quick enough, maybe to find nothing at all and have wasted a trip.

As it was, I ran him down that night in an oyster bar near Leicester Square. The rain had given off, but the clouds hadn’t, and it felt like snow. St. Ives sat reading a Standard that wasn’t long off the presses. News of the explosion, however, didn’t appear on the front page, which was fairly bursting with an extravagant story of another sort altogether. And here my own story digresses for a bit.

I wish I could quote it to you, this second story, but I haven’t got it anymore; so I’ll tell it to you straight out, although I warn you that I can’t do it justice, and that you wouldn’t half believe me if I could. Any good library, though, can afford you a copy of a London newspaper from the day in question, if you’re the sort of Thomas in the popular phrase.

And note that I haven’t tried to sandbag you with the notion that I’d seen this second tragedy as well as the explosion up in Holborn: what I’m telling you now is neither art nor journalism, but a sort of lager and lime mix-up of both, and maybe nearer the truth for that.

It was what the Standard referred to as an “imbroglio,” although that, I’m afraid, is a small word, and this was no small matter. A lorry had very nearly overturned on Whitefriars Street. It had been running along south, heavily laden, toward the Embankment, its load covered in canvas, several layers, and lashed down against the wind and possible rain. Some few witnesses claimed that there was a man beneath the canvas, too, peering out at the day, although no one saw him so clearly as to identify him beyond their generally agreeing that he ran to tall and thin, and was hatless and nearly bald.

The lorry, angling round across Tudor Street and onto Carmelite, caught a bit of stone curb with its wheel. There was a shifting of cargo and a horrible shout from the half-hidden man on board, and the wagon, as if it were a great fish on the end of a played-out line, shuddered almost to a stop, the horses stumbling and their shoes throwing sparks on the pavement. A terrible mechanical howling set in, as if an engine had just that minute been started up.

The driver—an enormous man with a beard—cursed and slammed at the reins and whipped the poor beasts nearest him as if to take the hide off their flanks. They tried to drive on, too— desperately, to hear the witnesses tell of it—but the lorry, or rather the cargo, seemed to compel the horses back, and for the space of a long minute it looked as if time had stopped dead, except for the suddenly falling rain and the cursing and the flailing of the driver. Then there was the snap of a stay chain coming loose and the lorry lurched forward, the chain swinging round into the spokes, and there was such a groaning and screeching and banging that it seemed sure the wagon would go to pieces on the road and the horses plummet down Carmelite and into the river.

It wasn’t the lorry, though, that was tearing itself apart. The air suddenly was full of flying debris, shooting out of the buildings along the street: nails and screws pried themselves out of door casings and clapboards; an iron pot flew from an open window as if it had been thrown; door knockers clanked and clattered and hammered in the hands of a dozen anxious ghosts and then tore away from their door-fronts with a screech of overstrained steel. Even the two iron hitching posts in front of the Temple Inn lurched out of the ground in a shower of dirt and stone fragments, and all of it shot away in the direction of that impossible lorry, a sort of horizontal hailstorm of hardware clanging and banging against the mysterious cargo and clamping tight to it as if glued there.

A man on the street, the paper said, was struck down by one of the posts, and wasn’t expected to recover his senses, and two or three others had to be attended to by the surgeon, who removed “shrapnel and all manner of iron debris.” Shop windows were shattered by stuff inside flying out through them, and the wagon itself, as if possessed, rocked up and down on its hounds like a spring pole.

During the mêlée there sounded an awful screaming and scrabbling from under the canvas, where the unfortunate passenger (fortunate, actually, that he was padded by several folds of heavy canvas) fought to clamber farther around behind the cargo. His cries attested to his partial failure to accomplish this feat, and if the strange business had gone on a moment longer he would have been beaten dead, and half a dozen houses along Tudor and Carmelite dismantled nail by nail and left in a heap.

The howling noise stopped, though, just like that. The horses jerked forward and away, hauling the lorry with its broken stay chain and spokes, and disappearing around onto the Embankment as the rush of iron debris fell straight to the roadway in a shower, clanking along in the wake of the wagon until it all tired out and lay still.

The street lay deathly silent after that, although the whole business took only about a minute and a half. Rain began to pour down (I’ve already described it; it was the same rain that saved the baker’s shop up in Holborn), and the lorry got away clean, no one suspecting that the whole odd mess involved any definable crime until it was discovered later in the afternoon that a building owned by the Royal Academy—a machine works—had been broken into and a complicated piece of machinery stolen and the paper company next door ignited... It was thought at first (by anyone who wasn’t certifiable) that this business of the flying iron might be connected to the theft of the machine.

The peculiar thing, then, was that a spokesman from the Royal Academy—the secretary, Mr. Parsons—denied it flat out and quick enough so that his denials were printed in the Standard by nightfall. There wasn’t any connection, he said. Couldn’t be. And he was extremely doubtful about any nonsense concerning flying door knockers. Science, Mr. Parsons seemed to say, didn’t hold with flying door knockers.

Tell that to the man laid out by the iron post, I remember thinking, but it was St. Ives and Godall who between them made the whole thing plain. I forgot to tell you, in fact, that Godall was at the oyster bar, too—he and Hasbro, St. Ives’s gentleman’s gentleman.

But this is where art leans in and covers the page with her hand—she being leery of making things plain when the story would be better left obscure while the reader draws a breath. “All in good time” has ever been the way of art.

And anyway it wasn’t until the first of the ships went down in the Dover Strait that any of us was certain—absolutely certain; or at least Godall was, from the deductive end of things, and St. Ives from the scientific. I wasn’t certain of anything yet.

I was sitting on one of Godall’s sofas, I remember, waiting for the arrival of St. Ives and thinking that I ought to take up a pipe and thinking too that I had enough vices already—indolence being one of them—when a man came in with a parcel. Godall reacted as if the Queen had walked in, and introduced the man to me as Isaac Laquedem, but aside from the odd name and his great age and frailty, there seemed to be nothing notable about him. He was a peddler, actually, and I forgot about him almost at once, their business having nothing to do with me—or with this story except in a peripheral way.

My father-in-law, William Keeble, had been teaching me the trade of toy-making, and I sat there meddling with an India-rubber elephant with enormous ears that I had finished assembling that very morning. Its trunk would rotate when you pushed its belly, and the ears would flap, and out of its mouth would come the magnified noise of ratcheting gears, which sounded, if you had an imagination, like trumpeting—or at least like the trumpeting of a rubber elephant with mechanical nonsense inside. It was funny to look at, though.

I remember wondering what it would have been like if Keeble himself had built it, and thinking that I at least ought to have given it a hat, maybe with a bird in it, and I listened idly to Godall and the old fellow talk about numismatics and about a clockwork match that the man was peddling. Then he left, very cheerfully, entirely forgetting his parcel of matches and going away up Rupert Street toward Brewer.

A minute passed, neither of us noticing the parcel. Then Godall spotted it and shouted damnation, or something, and I was up and out the door with it under my arm and with my elephant in my other hand. I ran up the street, dodging past people until I reached the corner, where I found the old man in a tearoom trying to sell little cheesecloth bags of green tea that could be dropped into a cup of boiling water and then retrieved again—not for the purpose of being reused, mind you, but so that the leaves wouldn’t muck up the brew. The proprietor read tea leaves, though, as well as palms and scone crumbs, and wasn’t at all interested in the invention, although I thought it was fairly clever and said so when I returned his automatic matches. He said that he admired my elephant, too, and I believe he did. We chatted over a cup of tea for ten minutes and then I strolled back down, thinking correctly that St. Ives would have shown up by then.

There at the side of the street, half a block up from the cigar divan, was a hansom cab, rather broken-down and with a curtain of shabby velvet drawn across the window. As I was passing it, the curtain pushed aside and a face popped out. I thought at first it was a woman, but it wasn’t; it was a man with curled hair to his shoulders. His complexion was awful, and he had a sort of greasy look about him and a high effeminate collar cut out of a flowery chintz. It was his eyes, though, that did the trick. They were filled with a mad unfocused passion, as if everything around him—the cab, the buildings along Rupert Street, me—signified something to him. His glance shot back and forth in a cockeyed vigilance, and he said, almost whispering, “What is that?”

He was looking up the street at the time, so I looked up the street too, but saw nothing remarkable. “Beg your pardon,” I said.

“That there.”

He peered down the street now, so I did too.

“There.”

Now it was up into the air, toward a bank of casements on the second floor. There was a man staring out of one, smoking a cigar.

“Him?” I asked.

He gave me such a look that I thought I’d landed upon it at last, but then I saw that I was wrong.

“That. In your hand.”

The elephant. He blinked rapidly, as if he had something in his eye. “I like that,” he said, and he squinted at me as if he knew me. There was something in his face, too, that I almost recognized. But he was clearly mad, and the madness, somehow, had given him a foreign cast, as if he were a citizen from nowhere on earth and had scrambled his features into an almost impenetrable disguise.

I felt sorry for him, to tell you the truth, and when he reached for the rubber elephant, I gave it to him, thinking, I’ll admit, that he’d give it back after having a look. Instead he disappeared back into the cab, taking the elephant with him. The curtain closed, and I heard from him no more. I knocked once on the door. “Go away,” he said.

So I did. He wanted the creature more than I wanted it. What did I want to build toys for, anyway, if not for the likes of him? And besides, it pretty clearly needed a hat. That’s the sort of thing I told myself. It was half cowardice, though, my just walking away. I didn’t want to make a scene by going into the cab after him and be found brawling with a madman over a rubber elephant. I argued it out in my head as I stepped into Godall’s shop, ready to relate the incident to my credit, and there, standing just inside the threshold, impossibly, was the lunatic himself.

I must have looked staggered, for Hasbro leaped up in alarm at the sight of my face, and the person in the doorway turned on her heel with a startled look. She wasn’t the fellow in the truck; she was a woman with an appallingly similar countenance and hair, equally greasy, and with a blouse of the same material. This one wore a shawl, though, and was older by a good many years, although her face belied her age. It was almost unlined due to some sort of unnatural puffiness—as if she were a goblin that had come up to Soho wearing a cleverly altered melon for a head. This was the mother, clearly, of the creature in the cab.

She smiled theatrically at me. Then, as if she had just that instant recognized me, her smile froze into a look of snooty reproach, and she ignored me utterly from then on. I had the distinct feeling that I’d been cut, although you’d suppose that being cut by a madwoman doesn’t count for much—any more than having one’s rubber elephant stolen by a madman counts for anything.

“A man like that ought to be brought to justice,” she said to St. Ives, who gestured toward the sofa and raised his eyebrows at me.

“This is Mr. Owlesby,” he said to the woman. “You can speak freely in front of him.”

She paid me no attention at all, as if to say that she would speak freely, or would not, before whomever she chose, and no one would stop her. I sat down.

“Brought to justice,” she said.

“Justice,” said St. Ives, “was brought to him, or he to it, sometime back. He died in Scandinavia. He fell into a lake where he without a doubt was frozen to death even before he drowned. I... I saw him tumble into the lake myself. He didn’t crawl out.”

“He did crawl out.”

“Impossible,” said St. Ives—and it was impossible, too. Except that when it came to the machinations of Dr. Narbondo you were stretching a point using the word impossible, and St. Ives knew it. Doubt flickered in his eyes, along with other emotions, too complex to fathom. I could see that he was animated, though. Since his dealings with the comet and the death of Ignacio Narbondo, St. Ives had been enervated, drifting from one scientific project to another, finishing almost nothing, lying on the divan in his study through the long hours of the afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep. For the space of a few days he had undertaken to restore Alice’s vegetable garden, but the effort had cost him too much, and he had abandoned it to the moles and the weeds. I could turn this last into a metaphor of the great man’s life over the last couple of years, but I won’t. I promised to leave tragedy alone.

“Look here,” the woman said, handing across what appeared to be a letter. It had been folded up somewhere for years, in someone’s pocket from the look of it, and the cheap paper was yellowed and torn. It was addressed to someone named Kenyon, but the name was new to me and the contents of the letter were nothing of interest. The handwriting was the point as was the signature: Dr. Ignacio Narbondo. St. Ives handed it across to Godall, who was measuring out tobacco on a balance scale in the most disinterested way imaginable.

She handed over a second letter, this one fresh from last week’s post. It was in an envelope that appeared to have been dropped in the street and trod upon by horses, and part of the letter inside, including the salutation, was an unreadable ruin. The first two paragraphs were written in a plain hand, clearly by a man who cared little for stray blots and smudges. And then, strangely, the final several sentences were inscribed by the man who had written the first missive. It didn’t take an expert to see that. There was a flourish in the T’s, and the uppercase A, of which there were two, was several times the size of any other letter, and was printed rather than enscripted, and then crossed pointlessly at the top, giving it an Oriental air. In a word, the handwriting at the end of this second letter was utterly distinct, and utterly identical to that of the first. The signature, however, was different. “H. Frost,” it read, with a scattering of initials afterward that I don’t recall.

The text of this second letter was interesting. It mentioned certain papers that this H. Frost was anxious to find, and would pay for. He was a professor, apparently, at Edinburgh University, a chemist, and had heard rumors that papers belonging to our madwoman’s father were lost in the vicinity of the North Downs some forty years ago. He seemed to think that the papers were important to medical science, and that her father deserved a certain notoriety that he’d never gotten in his tragic life. It went on so, in flattering and promising tones, and then was signed, as I said, “H. Frost.”

St. Ives handed this second letter to Godall and pursed his lips. I had the uncanny feeling that he hesitated because of his suspicions about the woman, about her reasons for having come round with the letters at all. “The doctor is dead, madam,” was what he said finally.

She shook her head. “Those letters were written with the same hand; anyone can see that.”

“In fact,” said St. Ives, “the more elaborate the handwriting, the easier it is to forge. The reproduction of eccentricities in handwriting is cheap and easy; it’s the subtleties that are difficult. Why someone would want to forge the doctor’s hand, I don’t know. It’s an interesting puzzle, but one that doesn’t concern me. My suggestion is to ignore it utterly. Don’t respond. Do nothing at all.”

“He ought to be brought to justice is what I’m saying.”

“He’s dead,” said St. Ives finally. And then, after a moment of silence, he said, “And if this mystery were worth anything to me at all, then I’d have to know a great deal more about the particulars, wouldn’t I? What papers, for example? Who was your father? Do you have any reason to think that his lost papers are valuable to science or were lost in the North Downs forty years ago?”

Now it was her turn to hesitate. There was a good deal that she wasn’t saying. Bringing people to justice wasn’t her only concern; that much was apparent. She fiddled with her shawl for a moment, pretending to adjust it around her shoulders but actually casting about her mind for a way to reveal what it was she was after without really revealing anything at all. “My father’s name was John Kenyon. He was... misguided when he was young,” she said. “And then he was misused when he was older. He associated with the grandfather of the man you think is dead, and he developed a certain serum, a longevity serum, out of the glands of a fish, I misremember which one. When the elder Narbondo was threatened with transportation for experiments in vivisection, my grandfather went into hiding. He went over to Rome...”

“Moved to the Continent?” asked St. Ives.

“No, he became a papist. He repented of all his dealings in alchemy and vivisection, and would have had me go into a nunnery to save me from the world, except that I wouldn’t have it. His manuscripts disappeared. He claimed to have destroyed them, but I’m certain he didn’t, because once, when I was about fifteen, my mother found what must have been them, in a trunk. They were bound into a notebook, which she took and tried to destroy, but he stopped her. They fought over the thing, she calling him a hypocrite and he out of his mind with not knowing what he intended to do.

“But my father was a weak man, a worm. He saved the notebook right enough and beat my mother and went away to London and was gone a week. He came home drunk, I remember, and penitent, and I married and moved away within the year and didn’t see him again until he was an old man and dying. My mother was dead by then for fifteen years, and he thought it had been himself that killed her— and it no doubt was. He started in to babble about the notebook, again, there on his deathbed. It had been eating at him all those years. What he said, as he lay dying, was that it had been stolen from him by the Royal Academy. A man named Piper, who had a chair at Oxford, wanted the formulae for himself, and had got the notebook away from him with strong drink and the promise of money. But there had never been any money. I ought to find the notebook and destroy it, my father said, so that he might rest in peace.

“Well, the last thing I cared about, I’ll say it right out, was him resting in peace. The less peace he got, the better, and amen. So I didn’t do anything. I had a son, by then, and a drunk for a husband who was as pitiful as my father was and who I hadn’t seen in a fortnight and hoped never to see again. But I was never a lucky one. That part don’t matter, though. What matters is that there are these papers that he mentions, this notebook. And I know that it’s him—the one you claim is dead up in Scandinavia—that wants the papers now. No one else knows about them, you see, except him and a couple of old hypocrites from the Royal Academy, and they wouldn’t need to ask me about them, would they, having stolen the damned things themselves. He’s got his methods, the doctor has, and this letter doesn’t come as any surprise to me, no surprise at all. If you know him half as well as you claim to, gentlemen, then it won’t come as any surprise to you either, no matter how many times you think you saw him die.”

And so ended her speech. It just rushed out of her, as if none of it were calculated, and yet I was fairly certain that every word had been considered and that half the story, as they say, hadn’t been told. She had edited and euphemized the thing until there was nothing left but the surface, with the emotional nonsense put in to cover the detail that was left out.

She had got to St. Ives, too. And Godall, it seemed to me, was weighing out the same bag of tobacco for the tenth time. Both of them were studying the issue hard. If she had come in through the door intending to address their weightiest fear, she could hardly have been more on the money than she was. Something monumental was brewing, and had been since the day of the explosion and the business down by the Embankment. No run-of-the-mill criminal was behind it; that weeks had gone by in the meantime was evidence only that it was brewing slowly, that it wouldn’t be rushed, and was ominous as a result.

“May we keep the letters?” asked St. Ives.

“No,” she replied, snatching both of them off the counter where Godall had laid them. She turned smiling and stepped out onto the sidewalk, climbing into the waiting cab and driving away, just like that, without another word. She had got us, and that was the truth. St. Ives asking for the letters had told her as much.

Her sudden departure left us just a little stunned, and it was Godall who brought us back around by saying to St. Ives, “I fancy that there is no Professor Frost at Edinburgh in any capacity at all.”

“Not a chemist, certainly. Not in any of the sciences. That much is a ruse.”

“And it’s his handwriting, too, there at the end.”

“Of course it is.” St. Ives shuddered. Here was an old wound opening up—Alice, Narbondo’s death in Scandinavia, St. Ives once again grappling with weighty moral questions that had proven impossible to settle. All he could make out of it all was guilt—his own. And finally he had contrived, by setting himself adrift, simply to wipe it out of his mind. Now this—Narbondo returning like the ghost at the feast...

“It’s just the tiniest bit shaky, though,” Godall said, “as if he were palsied or weak but was making a great effort to disguise it, so as to make the handwriting of this new letter as like the old as possible. I’d warrant that he wasn’t well enough to write the whole thing, but could only manage a couple of sentences; the rest was written for him.”

“A particularly clever forger, perhaps...” began St. Ives. But Godall pointed out the puzzle:

“Why forge another man’s handwriting but not use his name? That’s the key, isn’t it? There’s no point in such a forgery unless these are deeper waters than they appear to be.”

“Perhaps someone wanted the letter to get round to us, to make us believe Narbondo is alive...”

“Then it’s a puzzling song and dance,” said Godall, “and far more a dangerous one. We’re marked men if she’s right. It’s Narbondo’s way of calling us out. I rather believe, though, that this is his way of serving her a warning, of filling her with fear; he’s come back, he means to say, and he wants that notebook.”

“I believe,” said St. Ives, “that if I were her I’d tell him, if she knows where it is.”

“That’s what frightens me about the woman,” said Godall, sweeping tobacco off the counter. “She seems to see this as an opportunity of some sort, doesn’t she? She means to tackle the monster herself. My suggestion is that we find out the whereabouts of this man Piper. He must be getting on in age, probably retired from Oxford long ago.”

Just then a lad came in through the door with the Standard, and news that the first of the ships had gone down off Dover. It was another piece to the puzzle, anyone could see that, or rather could sense it, even though there was no way to know how it fit.

The ship had been empty, its captain, crew, and few paying passengers having put out into wooden boats for the most curious reason. The captain had found a message in the ship’s log—scrawled into it, he thought, by someone on board, either a passenger or someone who had come over the side. It hadn’t been there when they’d left the dock at Gravesend; the captain was certain of it. They had got a false start, having to put in at Sterne Bay, and they lost a night there waiting for the cargo that didn’t arrive.

Someone, of course, had sneaked on board and meddled with the log; there had never been any cargo.

What the message said was that every man on board must get out into the boats when the ship was off Ramsgate on the way to Calais. They must watch for a sailing craft with crimson sails. This boat would give them a sign, and then every last one of them would take to the lifeboats and row for all he was worth until they’d put a quarter mile between themselves and the ship. Either that or they would die—all of them.

It was a simple mystery, really, baffling, but with nothing grotesque about it. Until you thought about it—about what would have happened if the captain hadn’t opened the logbook and those men hadn’t got into the boat. The message was in earnest. The ship sank, pretty literally like a stone, and although the crew was safe, their safety was a matter of dumb luck. Whoever had engineered the disaster thought himself to be Destiny, and had played fast and high with the lives of the people on board. That had been the real message, and you can bank on it.

The captain lost his post as well as his ship. Why hadn’t he turned about and gone back to Dover? Because the note in the log didn’t hint that the ship would be destroyed, did it? It was more than likely a hoax, a prank—one that would kill a couple of hours while they tossed in the lifeboat and then rowed back over to her and took possession again. He had never even expected to see the doubtful sailcraft. And they were already a day late because of the stopover at Sterne Bay. It was all just too damned unlikely to take seriously, except the part about getting into the boats. The captain wouldn’t risk any lives, he said.

But there it was: the ship had gone down. It hadn’t been the least bit unlikely in the end. There were only two things about it that were unlikely, it seemed to us: one was that the crew, every man jack of them, had remained in Dover, and shipped out again at once. The word of the captain was all that the authorities had; and he, apparently, was a Yank, recently come over from San Francisco. The second unlikelihood was that this business with the ship was unrelated to the two London incidents.