The Dead Assassin: The Paranormal Casebooks of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (20 page)

“No. Nowadays we play different games. With greater outcomes.”

Something up the street caught Conan Doyle’s eye. He grabbed Wilde by the lapel of his coat, propelled him into a nearby shop doorway, and pressed him up against the door.

“What? Must we really fight about this? Or are we about to dance?”

“Look.” Conan Doyle nodded at two bowler-hatted men standing on a street corner, looking about, studying the faces of passersby.

“Dandelion and Burdock! Not again! Did they see us?”

“I think not.”

“What now?”

Conan Doyle reached into a pocket, removed the cogwheel and tossed it in his hand. “The shopkeeper is possessed of a keen mechanical bent, and yet he said he’d never seen the like of this gear. He concluded it was clearly the work of a master engineer. It just so happened that a master engineer visited Tarquin Hogg shortly before he was murdered. I think we need to pay a visit to Ozymandius Arkwright.”

At that precise moment a hansom veered around a stationary omnibus and clopped in their direction. “Here comes a cab now, Oscar. Quickly.”

They stepped from the shop doorway and flagged the cab. The two friends clambered aboard and Conan Doyle shouted for the cabbie to drive on.

“Did they see us?” Wilde asked.

Conan Doyle turned and peered out the back window.

“If they did, they show no signs. I think we made a clean escape.” He instructed the driver to take them to an address Wilde had never heard of, a place on the very outskirts of London.

“Where are we going?”

“Arkadia.”

“What’s that?”

“Arkwright’s factory. This may take a while. I’m afraid it’s a bit out of the way.”

“Ah,” said Wilde, and then took out his silver cigarette case and counted how many cigarettes he had left. “So long as it’s no farther than seven cigarettes there should no problem.”

The two fell into reverie as the cab clopped through the busy streets. Finally Conan Doyle turned to Wilde and said, “Why did you ask for the noisiest toys in the shop?”

Wilde paused in lighting up his second cigarette of the journey. “My wife, Constance, suffers from the most excruciating migraines.”

“What? You can’t. You couldn’t do that!” Conan Doyle said, utterly scandalized. “Oh, that’s terribly cruel, Oscar!”

“As I have told you, Arthur. These days, Robert Sheridan is there to keep her company. He lingers in the parlor like the aroma of bacon long after the breakfast things have been cleared. I feel quite forgot. However, my little gift to our boys will be sure to keep me uppermost in her thoughts.”

CHAPTER   16

LOOK UPON MY WORKS AND TREMBLE

“What is this drab and dreary place, Arthur?”

“Arkadia. Spelled with a
k,
not a
c.
Note the sign.”

The hackney had traveled north for close to an hour, taking them to the ragged edge of the metropolis, a place where rows of brick houses abruptly transitioned into green fields. Up ahead, like a smudge of soot upon the landscape, stood a huge factory with rows of tall chimneys vomiting smoke.

They stepped down from the hackney and walked through an archway of wrought iron. The top of the arch spelled out a name in black iron letters:
ARKADIA
.

“Arkadia,” Wilde read aloud, and sniffed. “Obviously meant to be ironic. That name conjures a land of rustic simplicity and beauty. Yet all I see is a dark satanic mill with chimneys billowing brimstone and huddled before it a ghastly monotony of identical brick terraces.”

“It is a planned village. A model of sanitary and modern living. Arkwright has built a place for his workers to live, complete with a church and town hall.”

“Planned dreariness more like it. Why can the English not build villages modeled after those in Tuscany? Are Italian bricks somehow more expensive to make?”

Like the strands of a web, all streets led to the factory and were long and wide. The two friends set off walking at a good clip and it did not take long for Conan Doyle to concede Wilde’s point: the houses were indeed drab and anonymous. But compared to the filthy, dilapidated hovels many Londoners lived in, they were palaces.

The two friends had almost reached the factory gates when they heard a familiar sound from behind:
wisshhhhthump … wishhhhhhhthump.… wishhhhhhhthump …

They turned to find a steam car bearing down on them. The top-hatted driver did not slow down, but instead squeezed the rubber bulb of a horn and honked impatiently. The two friends had barely time to throw themselves clear as the steam car whistled past and disappeared through the factory gates.

“That’s him now!” Conan Doyle grumbled. “Bounder near ran us over!”

Although the steam car was nowhere in sight when they passed through the gates, a figure in a stovepipe hat was. Standing upon a plinth was a bronze statue of a tall thin man with muttonchop whiskers, a cigar clamped in his jaws, and his trademark tall headgear. A brass plaque beneath it bore the inscription: O
ZYMANDIUS
A
RKWRIGHT,
B
ENEFACTOR
.

“Ozymandius, indeed?” Wilde snickered and began to recite in a chest-thumping voice the sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “My name is Ozymandius, king of kings: look upon my works, ye Mighty and despair!”

“Yes, very amusing, Oscar. I know the poem, too.”

“One moment,” Wilde said, wrinkling his nose. “Don’t you think there’s something a little odd about this statue?”

“Odd in what way?”

“The left arm looks a bit off. And the statue is not properly centered.”

A moment’s closer inspection revealed two cutoff brass stubs in the concrete plinth.

“This statue originally had a companion,” Wilde surmised. “A second figure that has since been removed. I would speculate that the pose has been amended. The arm was once draped about the shoulder of its neighbor, but has been cut off and the pose rather crudely changed.”

“Yes, you’re right, Oscar,” Conan Doyle agreed. “How odd. How very odd.”

*   *   *

After being left in a small waiting room for the best part of an hour, the two colleagues were then conducted into an even smaller waiting room. After an additional wait of twenty minutes, a balding secretary entered.

“Lord forbid,” Wilde muttered. “No doubt he’s come to shift us to a closet and from there into a biscuit tin.”

Instead, the secretary, muttering apologies for the wait, conducted them into a long, low-ceilinged room, brightly lit by strings of electric bulbs. Men in shirts and waistcoats wearing accountants’ visors with elastic garters holding up their sleeves stood at rows of drafting tables, working with pencils, protractors, compasses. Ozymandius Arkwright stood gazing over the shoulder of one of the draftsmen, and Conan Doyle noticed that the man’s hand trembled visibly as he drew.

When Arkwright finally noticed the two friends, he fixed them with a suspicious glare, his muttonchop whiskers bristling as he clenched a jaw so square it could have been machined from a billet of steel.

“What the bloody hell do you two want?” he bellowed in a broad, Yorkshire accent.

Conan Doyle removed his hat and spoke in a firm, but diplomatic tone. “Mister Arkwright, I am Arthur Conan Doyle and this is my friend, Oscar Wilde.”

There were few names in British society of equal fame, but it was obvious the master engineer was completely clueless. “Who? Never bloody heard of you. State your business and then kindly bugger off!”

“It’s about the fog, sir,” Wilde put in—rashly, it turned out.

At the mention of the word
fog
the large Yorkshire engineer grew apoplectic.

“Oh, I’ve seen you bloody London types before! Are you come here to dun me about the smoke my factories release? Ignorance, gentlemen. Mindless piffle! London sits on marshland through which a great river runs. There have been London fogs since Roman times. The puny efforts of man have no effect whatsoever upon the climate.”

Rather inadvisably, Wilde chose to argue the point. “But surely it must have some effect. When I smoke in my carriage it fogs the air dreadfully and my wife upbraids me. Of course, I simply must smoke as it is vital to the creative process, and yet still she complains.”

“Your analogy is baseless,” Arkwright sneered. “The interior of a carriage is a tiny space. By comparison the atmosphere is as vast and limitless as the oceans. Besides, do you know what that smoke represents?”

“Black lung?” Conan Doyle ventured; the man’s rudeness had got his dander up. “Respiratory distress, inflammation of the bronchioles, emphysema—”

“Work, sir! Work. Employment. Commerce. The creation of wealth for all. Food on the table for my workers. Employment for colliers. For coal merchants. Warmth for the hearths of millions. Baked bread to feed hungry bellies. A bloody small price to pay for an occasional smudge of soot on a fine gentleman’s starched collar.”

Conan Doyle let the Yorkshireman rant on until he, at last, paused for breath. “I’m afraid my friend misspoke. We have not come to discuss fog, but to discuss the
Fog Committee
.”

For a moment, a look of fear flashed across Ozymandius’s face before a fierce light burned hot in the gray eyes, a muscle quivered in the implacable jaw.

“Enough!” he barked, silencing Conan Doyle with a look. For the first time, he seemed aware of his draftsmen and a roomful of eavesdropping ears. He nodded toward a door at the end of the room. “Not here,” he said and added curtly, “Follow.”

They struggled to keep up with the industrialist, who walked with a distance-devouring stride, along first one corridor and through a door, followed by a second and then a third. With each doorway they passed through, the din of machinery grew steadily louder. Arkwright paused at a final door and flung it open. They stepped into a factory where the air vibrated with a percussive cacophony of pounding steam hammers, shrieking saws, and the roar of mighty steam engines turning enormous wheels, the brassy arms of their giant connecting rods pulverizing the air with each dizzy revolution. Dwarfed by the machines, men in overalls beetled about the factory floor, wrenching on giant beam engines, their faces runneling sweat, while women and children hunched over belt-driven machines with spinning wire brushes they used to polish shiny brass cogwheels. Once finished, they dropped the parts into baskets at their feet. When the growing pile threatened to overflow onto the floor, the baskets were hefted by other workers, loaded onto iron wheeled carts, and dragged away.

“Say what you have to say and be bloody quick about it,” the industrialist snarled, as he strode quickly across the factory floor. “I’m a busy man who earned his fortune through hard graft. Not a
gentleman
who idles his day away over cups of tea and the day’s newspapers. Time is money and I have none to fritter.”

“The other night, you almost ran over our carriage on Piccadilly. Soon after, we encountered a strange man, more monster than man. That same night, Tarquin Hogg was assassinated.”

At Conan Doyle’s words, Ozymandius stopped short and glared at the two friends. “Who are you two? Who sent you to my door?”

But instead of answering, Conan Doyle drew out the shiny cogwheel from his pocket and held it up for Arkwright to see. At the sight of the cogwheel, the engineer’s eyes widened, his jaw clenched. He looked ready to burst into a fit of histrionics, but instead his shoulders slumped and he growled, “Follow me.”

They left the noise of the factory, weaved through a maze of offices, and finally stepped into a large and gloomy space lined with bookcases bowing beneath collapsing piles of engineering texts—Arkwright’s private office. As they entered the room, the engineer crossed to his enormous desk and tossed a cloth over something he obviously did not want them to see. Conan Doyle hoped Wilde had also seen it, but the glimpse was so brief and the object so bizarre and out of keeping with the rest of the engineer’s business, later on he could not be certain of what he had truly seen.

One large window, dimmed by years of soot, looked out over a grimy rooftop to a row of smokestacks billowing clouds of carbon black. The walls of the office were hung with photographs of past triumphs: giant locomotives, iron bridges, steamships, colossal beam engines. The Yorkshireman gruffly gestured for them to take a seat in the two chairs set before his hulking desk while he paced the room, a man in perpetual motion. After the third circuit, he paused long enough to take a cigar from a wooden box. Seeming to remember his manners, he grudgingly thrust the box at his guests. After each took a turn with the cutter, the three men shared a quiet moment as they puffed their cigars into life.

A large framed photograph hung on the wall behind his desk: two gentlemen in matching stovepipe hats posing before a giant steam locomotive. The men had their arms draped about each other’s shoulders, a celebratory cigar clamped in their jaws. Ozymandius was the taller of the two, and shared a familial similarity with the shorter man—no doubt a brother. The photograph had been taken many years back, for both sported finely trimmed black beards devoid of a trace of gray.

Conan Doyle said nothing for several seconds. He took out the gearwheel and placed it upon Arkwright’s desk and asked, “Is it something of your manufacture? I was told by an expert that only an engineer of considerable talent could fashion such a piece.”

Arkwright stood looking down at the shiny metal gear, his jaw clenching. Finally, he could resist no longer and snatched it up, scrutinizing the object closely. He asked in an accusatory voice, “Where did you get this?”

“I found it in the house of Tarquin Hogg. It was part of a mechanical heart that had been implanted in the assassin’s chest. Someone is reanimating executed prisoners using these infernal devices and programming them to murder key figures in the government.”

“Whaaaaat?” The engineer exclaimed, his eyes widening. But then he shrugged it off and muttered, “Highly bloody fanciful!” and tossed the heavy metal gear back to Conan Doyle.

“So the piece is not of your manufacture?”