To Kingdom Come (2 page)

After the pie, I promised myself, I would sit down with a book in the library. Barker was an inveterate book collector, and being a Scot, he had a complete set of the Waverly novels. I had been working my way through them and was now up to
The Heart of Midlothian.

“One more time, lad, and we’re through for the night,” Barker said.

I sighed and raised my protesting arms again. It was then that we heard the boom. We both knew instantly that something had happened. If we hadn’t, Harm had. He began barking hysterically. It was his clarion cry, his alarm for us mortals too dull to appreciate that something significant had occurred. In answer, we heard dozens of responses from other canine sentinels across London.

We needed no other warning. Barker and I sprinted across the lawn toward the back door. Once inside, we skidded across the polished floor and climbed the first staircase. Running past my room, we mounted the stairs to Barker’s aerie. My employer seized a small box I’d never noticed before from one of the tables and tripped its latch. Inside was a brass telescope, a relic of his sailing days, I presumed. He flicked open the telescope and scanned the horizon to the west from one of the dormer windows.

“Anything?” I asked. “Anything?”

“Nothing appears to be on fire, but there is a haze on the far side of the river,” Barker responded.

I took the telescope eagerly and looked myself but saw only what my employer had said, a whitish haze over the river where our offices stood.

“What should we do?” I asked.

“I suppose we should go and see if anything is amiss.”

The latter seemed as sensible a decision as any. I left him and went down to the first floor for my jacket. When I came downstairs a few minutes later, knotting my tie, Barker’s butler, Jacob Maccabee, was waiting in the hall with a look of concern on his face.

“It could have been a factory accident, I suppose,” he said, straightening my knot. “Could you hear which direction it came from?”

“You know the garden,” I answered. “It’s like sitting in a soup bowl, with those high brick walls. The Guv looked toward the west.”

I hoped Mac was right, and our going out would be for naught. A factory accident would be preferable to the other possibility, a bomb. Since the previous year, a radical group calling itself the Irish Republican Brotherhood had been leading a dynamiting campaign against the city in an attempt to force a bill for Home Rule. Several bombs had been located safely by the authorities, and one had exploded harmlessly in the baggage room of Victoria Station, but the fact that the attempts had been unsuccessful was not a comfort to most Londoners. The Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard hastily formed a new section, the Special Irish Branch, to safeguard the public and the Royal Family. Despite their efforts, neither Mac nor I was surprised at the thought that the I.R.B. might strike again.

Finally, Barker came down the stairs. He was soberly dressed in a black cutaway coat, his maroon tie thrust up under a wing collar and held with a pearl stickpin. He stepped between us and reached for a stick from the hall stand before opening the door. I naturally followed. The pie and
Midlothian
would have to wait.

Our hansom cab, which Barker had acquired during our last investigation two months before, was quartered just a half mile
away to the east. I assumed my employer would send me to rouse the stable boy, something I’d prefer not to do after a full day’s work and those dratted exercises. As it turned out, that would have been preferable to what Barker had in mind.

“Right, then,” he stated. “Let’s hop it, lad.”

“Hop it, sir?”

“Aye. We’ll walk. You can use the exercise.”

He didn’t waste breath on conversation, but set off northwest along London Road, his stick swinging dangerously back and forth. At an inch or two over six feet in height, he was a head taller than I. Consequently, I had to double his footsteps in order to keep up.

Most of the streets on the south side of London were empty, the shops locked and dark. The residents, enjoying their well-deserved evening of rest, seemed unconcerned by the noise that had brought us out on this quiet evening. A chorus of crickets chirped in the vestiges of Lambeth Marsh south of us, accompanied by the low croak of the frogs that fed on them. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel as if I were back in the country at my childhood home in Wales.

Barker suddenly dodged off Waterloo Road, and had I not been trying to stay close, I would have shot past the lane he ducked into. For the next several minutes I felt as if I were in a maze, following my employer from street to passage to alleyway. Before I knew it, we’d come up along some railroad sleepers, and then we were on a bridge. Not Waterloo, nor Westminster, but a smaller bridge between the two.

“What bridge is this?” I asked, peering over the side at the Thames, which looked as thin and black as India ink.

“The Charing Cross Railway and Footbridge,” he called back, over his shoulder.

“Where does it fetch up?”

“On the Embankment behind Scotland Yard.”

“Wait,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “You mean there’s been a
footbridge
right by our offices all this time, and you didn’t tell me?”

“If I told you everything, Llewelyn, how ever would you learn anything for yourself ?”

I noticed an immediate difference on the west side of the river. There was a chalky grit in the air. The gaslights were balls of light on stalks, as if a globe of frosted glass had been fitted over each one. The haze grew thicker as we approached, and as I watched, wraithlike figures began to come forward out of the gloom. I’d have taken them for ghosts, if I believed in such things, but as we passed among them, they seemed tangible enough; normal citizens, covered in brick dust from head to toe, all staring with dazed expressions out of red-rimmed eyes. Barker and I reached for our pocket handkerchiefs and pushed ourselves through the foglike haze and the crowd of shocked and bedraggled residents. In Whitehall Place, we had to pick our way around piles of fallen bricks. It was only when we crossed Whitehall Street and looked back that we could see the full devastation.

“My word,” I murmured. It was the thirtieth of May 1884, and someone had just blown up Scotland Yard.

2

THE ENTIRE NORTHEASTERN CORNER OF THE
Criminal Investigation Department had been blown out, revealing a jumbled interior and carpeting the area in brick and rubble. In the gaping hole that exposed several floors, the denizens moved about like ants, already beginning to repair their hill. From where I stood, I could see the splintered wooden floor of the gymnasium in which Barker trained constables in physical culture. Our minds registered the fact that we would not be practicing there for some time to come.

“We must lend a hand, Thomas,” Barker said in my ear.

He joined a ring of men around a dying cab horse whose cries were setting my nerves on edge. I stepped back, and found myself standing outside the Rising Sun, a public house in which Barker and I had just eaten lunch a few hours before. The pub looked desolate and open without its glass, but there was activity inside.
Surely, they could not be open for business, as if nothing had happened,
I thought, as I stepped through the open door.

The building had been turned into a makeshift hospital. Everywhere, people were injured and bleeding, their wounds
wrapped in tea towels or handkerchiefs. I noticed some of the less badly wounded were trying to tend those with more severe lacerations. I started when I heard a gruff voice addressing me.

“You! Boy! Come here.”

An older fellow was gesturing to me. He was kneeling by a supine figure, a medical bag at his feet. Unwittingly, I’d stepped into an operating theater. Barker’s last words were still in my ears, and I stepped forward.

“How can I help?” I asked, crouching beside him.

“Get on the other side of this fellow and hold the wound closed, so I can stitch it. Are your hands clean?”

“I think so,” I said, holding them out. The doctor raised an open bottle of brandy from the floor and dashed some of it over my hands. Shaking them, I stepped over the body and got a good look at the victim for the first time. His face was soaked in blood. Between the horse, the patrons, and this patient, I’d seen more blood in the last three minutes than in my entire life.

“It looks bad, sir,” I couldn’t help commenting.

“Oh, he’ll live,” the old surgeon said. “Head wounds always bleed like this. Hold it just there. Pinch the wound closed.”

I did, and the doctor poured another jigger over the open wound. The patient jumped and let out a curse. I’d thought him senseless. Instead, he took a healthy swallow from the brandy bottle before the doctor leaned forward with the needle and thread.

Just then, there was a loud report outside and all cries from the horse ceased. I thought I had recognized the sound of Barker’s American Navy Colt revolver. A minute or two later, after the patient was finished being stitched, I looked up and saw that my employer was standing behind me, the reek of gunpowder still on his clothes.

“Good lad,” he said, after I’d mopped the patient’s bloody face with a rag and lifted his head enough for the physician to bind the wound with gauze. I stopped and wiped the gore from my hands
with a towel. A half hour before, I’d been waving my arms in the garden, and now I was assisting at an operation.

“Come, gentlemen,” the doctor admonished. “This is not our only patient.”

Barker and I responded by removing our jackets and rolling up our sleeves. What happened over the next half hour was more of the same: a number of nasty-looking surface injuries but, thankfully, no fatal ones. Just when my energy was flagging, a brace of capable matrons from nearby Charing Cross Hospital bustled in and immediately set to work. We were able to don our coats and steal away. Barker was anxious to see after his own chambers in the next street.

Debris had been blown over the buildings onto the roofs and cobblestones of Craig’s Court. Our offices looked solid as ever, but without benefit of glass, save a few shards. Broken bricks and slates had fallen upon the steps. Barker unlocked the door, though it was obvious that anyone could have vaulted the sill and climbed in.

In our waiting room, glass was strewn across the floor and furniture, and dust coated everything; but nothing appeared damaged. Barker moved on to his chambers quickly. There was more destruction there. A few bricks had come through the window. Fortuitously, I had closed and locked my desk, a maple roll-top that Barker had acquired for my predecessor. There was a large chip out of the top where a brick had struck it. A pedestal lay on its side farther into the room, with shards of what had been an antique Chinese vase, whose worth I couldn’t begin to calculate. Glass was scattered over the Persian rugs here, and a thick layer of dust coated the rows of bookcases that lined the room. Even Barker’s spartanly neat desk had not been spared. The few papers he’d allowed to remain were scattered and the inkwell had been knocked over, its contents dribbling down the side of the desk. Barker set the inkwell upright, then bent down
and picked up some of the shards of porcelain from the floor.

“Blast,” he muttered. Barker was a gentleman by decision, if not by birth. It was the most he would allow himself to say about the loss. I assumed the vase had some sentimental meaning to him, aside from its obvious intrinsic worth.

“It is in whole pieces,” I pointed out. “It can be mended. I saw an advertisement in
The Times
for an agency that promised they could make them look as good as new.”

Barker gently collected the pieces and set them on his desk, then befouled his handkerchief with the ink, wiping down the corner and sides of the desk. He had better luck here; the desk was kept so highly polished with beeswax that the ink could not penetrate to the wood. It had seeped into the floor, however, and those few spatters of ink would forever remind me of this night’s occurrence. Barker stepped by me and pitched the sodden handkerchief out the window into the dustbin.

“Unlock your desk and get out your pad, lad,” he ordered. “Let us make a list.”

I took the key from my waistcoat pocket and unlocked the drawer, removing my stenographic pad and a pencil, while Barker surveyed the room.

“We’ll need to get the glaziers in, first of all, of course,” he said. “I suggest we try someone from Lambeth. All the local tradesmen shall be besieged in the morning. Next, we must send this rug to be cleaned. Your desk shall have to be repaired and refinished. It was a good suggestion about the vase, though we both know it shall never be the same again. Perhaps you can track down that advertisement for me. Of course, we have hours of work ahead of us. Dusting these books will take days in itself. I wouldn’t want to be continually pulling bits of glass out of my fingertips from now on, whenever I needed a reference.”

“Certainly not,” I agreed. “Anything else?”

“I wonder …” he said. I knew the look in his eye, or at least
what he was thinking. The next thing he would do was unlock his smoking cabinet and take out one of his meerschaum pipes. It was a smooth finished pipe this time, instead of one of his more elaborately carved ones. The rim of the pipe was blackened, giving way to yellow and finally to purest white on the bowl. Barker pulled out his chair, reached for his handkerchief, and realized he’d thrown it out. He accepted mine, dusted the chair, and was soon seated, smoking his pipe and looking out through the bare window frames at the darkened offices across the street. I knew better than to interrupt him while he was thinking.