The Titanic Secret (10 page)

‘You a passenger, sir?’ a voice asked from just beside him, intruding upon his thoughts.

Tremayne glanced to his side to see a uniformed porter standing there expectantly.

‘Yes, yes we’re both passengers,’ he replied, and gestured towards their cases, each bearing a bright red and white sticker showing the name ‘White Star Line’ and the important word ‘Wanted’. Luggage was divided into two groups: ‘Not wanted on voyage’, meaning it would be locked away in one of the ship’s cavernous holds and be inaccessible throughout the voyage, and ‘Wanted’, luggage which would be delivered to the passenger’s cabin or stateroom. Tremayne and Maria needed all their luggage immediately available, for several reasons.

Tremayne felt in his jacket pocket for the tickets and boarding cards which Mansfield Cumming’s Secret Service Bureau had provided for them.

The porter scrutinized the tickets for a few moments and then nodded sagely before handing them back to Tremayne.

‘You’re first class passengers,’ he said, ‘so that means you have to embark through the forward entrance.’

He pointed towards the bow of the ship, and to a gangway which Tremayne had already noticed, chiefly because it seemed to have fewer people using it than the others.

Tremayne looked back to see that the porter was already loading Maria’s suitcase onto the trolley which stood beside him and moments later Tremayne’s own case followed it. Their two small portmanteaus went on top, and then the procession began making its way along the quayside towards the bow of the ship.

It took a while, simply because of the crowds that milled about the area, people in constant motion, back and forth as they moved towards or away from the vessel, while others stood still in groups, forcing the porter to steer his trolley around them. But eventually they reached the foot of the gangway, where a ship’s officer was waiting, obviously stationed there to ensure that everyone who passed the spot where he was standing was entitled to do so.

The porter removed their luggage from the trolley, and then stood waiting expectantly close by them. Tremayne nodded his thanks and handed him a few coins. The man touched his cap in acknowledgement, then seized the handles of his trolley and started walking back towards the milling crowds of people to seek out another customer.

There were a number of people already waiting to board the ship, all elegantly dressed passengers, several of them accompanied by personal servants, chambermaids and valets. Almost all appeared to own small mountains of expensive and matching leather cases. The piles of luggage on display made him wonder what else he and Maria ought to have brought with them, and he realized how little he really knew about the world he was about to enter.

There’s no such thing as an average English family, but Tremayne often thought that if there was, his background would have matched it perfectly. His parents lived on the outskirts of a small Kentish village, his father employed as an accountant at a local firm, a job he’d held ever since he left school. His mother kept house, and had never worked outside the home. Tremayne had a younger sister, Veronica, who had undergone secretarial training but realistically never expected to have to use that knowledge: the local doctor’s son had been walking out with her for some time, and their future together seemed as assured as it was inevitable.

Tremayne himself was the odd one out. As soon as he was able to, he’d shaken off the shackles of village life and moved to London, supporting himself by working at whatever jobs were on offer, some legal, others less so. He’d always been handy with his fists, and had never been averse to using them to end arguments that other people had started. But he’d soon tired of that style of living, and had left the capital. He had a flair for languages, and had picked up conversational German quickly after he’d worked his passage on a steamer going to Hamburg. He’d been in Königsberg in East Prussia, near the coast of the Baltic, when he’d encountered an eccentric Englishman trying to book himself a hotel room, and from that moment on, his life had changed.

Mansfield Cumming had been working for British Naval Intelligence since 1898, and had come up with a plan to travel Germany to try to glean information about the country’s naval preparedness. That wasn’t such a bad idea, but Cumming’s decision to portray himself as a successful German businessman was. Tremayne had used his fluent German to smooth over Cumming’s hideous mangling of the language, and within two days he’d been recruited as an unpaid British agent: at that time Cumming had virtually no access to funds.

He’d worked for the man ever since, moving with him in 1911 when Cumming had been appointed as the head of the Foreign Section of the newly formed Secret Service Bureau. Tremayne was now in receipt of a salary, but still lived the sort of modest, middle-class life he found most comfortable. High society had never interested or attracted him, most of the examples of that type of person he’d encountered seeming both vacuous and useless, the men especially. And now, at a stroke, he was going to have to pretend to be a member of that level of society himself.

Tremayne and Maria were clearly imposters in this world of first-class elegance, but that didn’t bother either of them. They were on the ship to do a job, and that was the end of it. Exercising typically British reserve, their fellow travellers simply nodded at them, but refrained from speaking, which again suited both Tremayne and Maria.

The genteel queue in front of them steadily diminished as the other passengers moved forward towards the gangway. When they reached the officer, Tremayne again took their tickets out of his pocket and handed them over for inspection, together with the boarding cards.

The officer kept the cards but checked the tickets, nodded, and handed them back. ‘Welcome to the
Titanic
, Mr and Mrs Maitland. You can board immediately, and your luggage will be delivered to your stateroom within the hour.’

‘Thank you.’

Tremayne stepped back to where their luggage was stacked on the dockside, picked up his own portmanteau and took a couple of steps towards the gangway.

The officer waiting there stopped him with a gesture. ‘Our stewards can attend to all your luggage if you’d prefer it, sir,’ he said.

But Tremayne shook his head. ‘I can manage this, thank you. I have some important papers and documents inside this case. I don’t want to let it out of my sight.’

‘As you wish, sir.’

In fact, Tremayne did have one sealed envelope in the portmanteau which Mansfield Cumming had had delivered to them immediately before they’d boarded the train to Southampton, along with instructions to open it only when they were on board the ship and in a location where the documents inside it could not be seen by any third party.

But that wasn’t the main reason why he insisted on carrying that particular case himself. Inside that portmanteau were the two Browning pistols, two suppressors and a quantity of ammunition, plus a number of other objects which had been supplied by Mansfield Cumming to assist them in the task he had set. If any of the ship’s staff had seen two of the items in particular, Tremayne was quite certain that not only would they not have been allowed on board the
Titanic
, but quite probably they would have been handed over to the police.

Once they stepped on board, they found stewards waiting to conduct the embarking passengers to their suites, staterooms or cabins. Tremayne showed one of the stewards the tickets, and the man immediately smiled and nodded.

‘Welcome aboard the
Titanic
, Mr and Mrs Maitland,’ he said echoing the words of the officer at the foot of the gangway. ‘My name is Alfred. Would you like me to carry that for you, sir?’ he asked, gesturing towards the portmanteau that Tremayne was still holding.

Tremayne shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s not very heavy. I’ve only got some papers in it.’

‘Then if you’d like to follow me, please.’

Alfred turned and led them through an open doorway over to the left of the lobby they were standing in, and they found themselves in an elegant open area which Tremayne thought looked like a reception room of some sort.

Alfred confirmed this immediately. ‘This is the first-class reception room,’ he said, pointing in front of them, ‘and through those doors over there is the main dining saloon. And to your right—’

But he was immediately interrupted by Maria, who was staring in that direction.

‘Wow!’ she exclaimed. ‘Will you take a look at that staircase? It’s gorgeous.’

It was undeniably magnificent. The vast wooden structure was essentially two staircases joined together, the outer sections leading down on either side to a half landing, from which the lower part of the staircase descended in a pair of elegant sweeping curves, separated by an ornate central banister. At the end of the banister, surmounting an intricately carved wooden pillar, stood a bronze carving of a cherub, holding aloft a light in the shape of a flaming torch.

‘That really is impressive,’ Tremayne remarked, thinking as he did so that the light seemed ridiculously ornate and complex for the simple task it was intended to perform.

‘That is the forward first-class staircase,’ Alfred explained. ‘It serves five decks, all the way from the Boat Deck down to D-Deck, which is where we are now. Then, below here there’s a normal staircase that leads down to E-Deck. I should explain that the decks on a ship are labelled from the top down, but usually the decks are named as well.’

‘So what’s D-Deck called?’ Tremayne asked.

‘They try to name them after the most important feature on that deck,’ Alfred said, ‘so on this ship we have the Boat Deck, Promenade Deck and so on. This deck is known as the Saloon Deck, because we have the main dining saloon here.’

He led the way over to the staircase, but paused just to one side of it before he led them up. ‘If you look here,’ he said, pointing upwards, ‘all the way to the top, you can see that there’s a huge glass dome covering the top of the staircase, up on the Boat Deck. So it’s really light and airy all day.’

Although electric lights were burning on the landings and around the staircase itself, most of the illumination came from the very top of the staircase. Tremayne looked where the steward was pointing, and high above them he could see what looked like a part of a glowing ball, as the glass dome was illuminated by sunlight.

‘At night,’ Alfred said, ‘you get the opposite effect. If you’re out walking on the Boat Deck, there’s this wonderful glow as the dome’s lit from below by the staircase lighting. Now we need to go up to the deck above.’

They followed him as he began climbing the stairs. ‘There’s another staircase,’ he added, ‘a smaller and less ornate version, further aft. They’re both reserved for use by first-class passengers only. The second- and third-class passengers have their own separate staircases located elsewhere on the ship.’

‘So which deck is our cabin on?’ Tremayne asked, as Alfred led the way up the staircase.

The clear division and segregation of the different grades of passenger didn’t surprise him. In fact, he thought it slightly amusing that so much trouble had been taken to ensure that first-class travellers would never have to be offended by the sight of a third-class man or woman, in case it put them off their luncheon or dinner. In Tremayne’s opinion, the reverse case was probably also true, and he knew that he, personally, would probably find life far more comfortable and agreeable in the lower-grade accommodation than where he would actually be spending his time on board.

‘Second-class passengers have cabins, sir,’ Alfred replied, smiling. ‘You’re first-class passengers, so you have a stateroom, and it’s on the deck we’re coming on to now. This is C-Deck, also known as the Shelter Deck. Now, before I take you to your accommodation, we have to visit the Purser’s Office to have your tickets inspected – that’s the last time, I promise you – so if you could just follow me just over here, please.’

Alfred walked across the landing to an office off to the starboard side, a long counter framed in polished wood, behind which two uniformed men were dealing with a small number of other first-class passengers.

‘As soon as one of the officers is free, please show him your tickets,’ Alfred said.

It wasn’t a long wait and once the formalities were over, Alfred led them across to the port side of the ship and turned aft down the passageway, past more first-class suites and staterooms.

Other passengers were already on board, strolling around this area of the ship, many of the stateroom doors standing wide open to reveal chambermaids and valets unpacking trunks and suitcases. Tremayne spotted a distinguished-looking man walking towards them, a much younger lady, clearly several months pregnant, holding on to his arm. Maria nudged Tremayne as they passed in the corridor.

‘That’s Colonel John Jacob Astor,’ she murmured. ‘He’s one of the richest men in America. He could probably afford to buy this ship, not just buy a passage to America on it.’

‘And he’s travelling with his daughter, by the looks of it,’ Tremayne replied, glancing behind him at the couple.

Maria giggled. ‘That’s not his daughter,’ she said. ‘That’s Madeleine Talmage Force, his second wife. He’s forty-eight and she’s nineteen, and they married last year. It was a big scandal in the States, just him getting divorced, and when he married a girl who’s a year younger than his son from his first marriage, you could hear a drum roll of jaws dropping right across America. I think he came over to Europe to wait for the heat to die down.’

‘If he’s as rich as you say he is, I don’t suppose he’s too bothered about what people think of him.’

‘Probably not. That kind of wealth acts as a really good insulator against the world.’

‘These staterooms are some of the biggest on the ship,’ Alfred said, indicating the doors on the right-hand side as he continued down the corridor.

Astor wasn’t the only American Maria spotted. As they moved through the ship, she pointed out Benjamin Guggenheim, another millionaire who was accompanied, she said, by his mistress, as his wife and family were at their home in New York.