Death on the Lizard (2 page)

It was not just these natural beauties which brought people to the most southern point of England. Over the centuries, drawn by its resources, men had come to mine the tin and copper and china clay; to fish the rich waters of the Channel and build boats for the fishing fleet; to raise cattle and sheep and build and run the railways which took the meat and fleece to market. As wreckers, they had plundered the ships which had come to grief on the treacherous coastal rocks. As privateers and pirates, they had robbed Channel shipping and raided the towns along the Channel coast. And now, some men had come to the Lizard for a new reason. They were employed by the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company. They had come to send wireless messages across the Atlantic.

Jack Gordon—that was the name he went by—was one of those wireless telegraphers. With two other operators, he was responsible for the wireless station at Bass Point, just to the east of Lizard Village. Tonight, he had joined the revelers in the main room of the Drowned Boy, but not in a spirit of comradeship. A small, wary-looking man in his forties, he sat alone in a far corner, biting his nails and brooding over a mug of ale, the candle on the table casting flickering shadows over his darkly bearded face.

After a time he was joined by a younger man with blond hair and a fresh complexion, dressed in a rough Cornish jerkin, who stopped by the table and casually pinched out the candle flame as he sat down. In the darkened corner, the two of them fell into a murmured conversation, the younger man doing most of the talking, Jack answering only briefly. Their conversation, however, became contentious, and as it went on, Jack's brows lowered belligerently, his mouth set in an increasingly stubborn line, and he shook his head to every question. The evening's merriment flowed around them, cries of laughter and shouted stories, clouds of tobacco smoke and clinking of glasses, but for all the attention they paid, the pair in the dark corner might have been alone in an empty room.

After a while, their discussion came to an end, and they sat in silence. Then the younger man gave a careless shrug of his broad shoulders, as if saying “Enough, I'm done with you,” and got up and left the pub. Jack fetched another half-pint from the bar, returned to his corner to drink it alone, and then left too, a bit unsteady on his feet. The table was immediately seized by three men with a deck of cards, a match was put to the candle, and a rowdy game got underway.

Once outside, Jack took his lantern from among those lined up on a shelf, and hesitated. It was past ten and a full moon had risen, silvering the Cornish heath. The rocky path gleamed whitely, like the Milky Way. He was only a little drunk, and he'd walked the path along the sea cliffs of Housel Bay a good many times in the eight or nine months he'd lived and worked at the Bass Point wireless station. No need to light the lantern.

Head bent, shoulders hunched against the wind which buffeted the Lizard, Jack trudged along the clifftop path, thinking angrily about the demands Wolf had made. It wasn't fair, wasn't right, that's what it was. He'd already given them more than he'd signed on for. In the circumstance—and a bloody difficult circumstance it was, too—anything more would call attention to him, which would make the situation difficult, dangerous, even. And Wolf hadn't mentioned paying him any more, had he?

Jack grunted scornfully. Of course he hadn't. This one was just like the other one they'd sent, wanting something for nothing, playing on his patriotism. It was all a load of rubbish, that's what it was. He wasn't in this business because of loyalty to his native country, or his family, or any of that fancy stuff. He was in it for himself, pure and simple, and it was time they recognized his value and paid him what he was worth.

And what was more, there was no way to get his hands on the bloody thing. Even when Gerard brought it to Bass Point for testing, he never let it out of his sight. And as soon as the test was completed, into the box it went and back to Poldhu. You'd think it was a pot of gold.

Well, that was that, and an end of the bloody business. Within the fortnight, he'd be gone on holiday, and well out of it. This place was beginning to get on his nerves. End of the earth, the local folk called it, and by damn, they were right. He paused to look down at the silver surf pounding on the glittering black rocks at the foot of the cliff, far below. End of the earth, that's what it was. Nothing beyond the toe of the Lizard but a great lot of water, and America somewhere out there beyond the western horizon. Standing there on the edge of the cliff, facing the silver sea, he might have been the last man in the world.

But he wasn't.

Some fifty yards behind, a man in a dark jacket and hat was picking his way along the same cliff path. He went gingerly, for the moon's quicksilver light was pure trickery and the rock-strewn path was brushed with deceptive shadows. A shorter distance ahead of him, along the headland path, a man in a Cornish jerkin watched as well, the tip of his cigarette glowing briefly in the shadow, then vanishing, ground underfoot. If either of them saw what accident befell the wireless operator, no one else knew. If either of them—or someone else—was involved in the accident, no one else knew that either.

All that was known was what was discovered by a fisherman the following morning: A lantern abandoned in the path, and a man's broken body sprawled face-down on the rocks at the foot of the cliff, just out of reach of the greedy sea.

CHAPTER ONE

 
James Russell Lowell

 
 
 
Charles Sheridan was whistling as he left Bishop's Keep and drove his Panhard down the narrow lanes and through the hamlets which lay between the village of Dedham and the town of Chelmsford. On this last day of June, he felt himself to be a happy man. The sky was clear and blue, the sun was bright and the temperature mild, the road's grassy verges were lavished with purple thistle and foxgloves and wild mignonette. His life was rich and enormously full. He had been born to a station which provided a splendid living with no effort at all on his part, a circumstance which (though no fault of his own) still cost him occasional pangs of guilt. He loved a beautiful and talented woman who returned his love without reservation and who, after nearly eight years of marriage, responded to him just as eagerly as she had in the beginning. He patiently (more or less) fulfilled the obligations of his seat in the House of Lords, and did what he could to effect changes in government policies—not an easy or comfortable effort, since most of the other Lords did not agree with him on any point.

But while his idle friends might complain that life was an endless bore, Charles, Lord Sheridan, fifth Baron Somersworth, enjoyed tuning his fancy to new and interesting challenges. And as he drove into the outskirts of Chelmsford, he was pursuing his latest and most compelling interest: wireless telegraphy. He had studied Morse Code while he was serving in the Royal Engineers and had learnt at first hand that swift and reliable communications were vital to the success of military operations. Telegrams were a great improvement on signal lights, semaphore, and carrier pigeons, but were fine only as far as they went—as far as the end of the telegraph wire, where the message was turned over to the uncertain mercies of the dispatch carrier, and might or might not reach its ultimate destination. Telephones had a similar limitation, and more: the instruments had to be connected through an exchange. Wireless, on the other hand— now that was a concept which looked to the future.

In Hall Street, Charles turned at a two-story brick building which had once been a silk factory but now proclaimed itself, in letters three feet high, to be Marconi's Wireless Telegraphy Company. For the past ten years, a dozen or so scientists and inventors, among them a young Italian named Guglielmo Marconi, had been experimenting with electromagnetic waves (called Hertzian waves, after their discoverer) which seemed to travel through the air in the same way that waves from a stone thrown in a pool rippled in concentric circles through the water. Professor Hertz had demonstrated that these waves lent themselves to the transmission and reception of the telegraphic code invented by Samuel Morse a half-century earlier. A clever young Italian, Marconi had improved upon Hertz's “resonator,” a device used to intercept the signals, and then used his mother's connections (Annie Jameson Marconi's Irish family had made its fortune in whiskey) to raise enough capital to set himself up in business in England. In a scant few years, Marconi's Wireless Telegraphy Company had secured the necessary investment capital, obtained patents, built experimental stations along the coast, produced equipment, and installed it on numerous ships.

Then, in December 1901, Marconi did the impossible. He transmitted the Morse letter “S”—
dit-dit-dit
—from a wireless station in Cornwall all the way to Newfoundland. Now there was a daily wireless news service between England and America, and the Marconi Company seemed—to all appearances, anyway—to be supremely successful.

Charles took off his goggles and motoring gloves, climbed out of the Panhard, and went into the Wireless Company by the rear door. He had met Marconi shortly after the young man's arrival in England in late 1896, and three years later had helped him set up this factory in Chelmsford, only eight miles from Bishop's Keep. Charles had his own wireless receiver, so he and Marconi kept in frequent touch and occasionally saw one another when the inventor came down from the City to visit the Company.

When Charles entered the office, however, it was not Marconi who greeted him, but a fair-haired, heavyset man with florid cheeks.

“Ah, there you are, old chap,” Bradford Marsden said cordially, with the air of a man who had expected an earlier arrival. He transferred his cigar to his left hand and extended his right. “Good of you to come. Will you join me in a brandy?”

“Hullo, Marsden,” Charles replied in some surprise, taking the hand. “No, no brandy for me, thanks. It's good to see you.”

“You too, old man.” Bradford went to the sideboard and helped himself, clearly an announcement of proprietary rights. “And how is our spirited Kate?” he asked, over his shoulder.

“As irrepressible as always,” Charles replied, thinking that his wife would smile at the phrase. He had known Bradford Marsden since they were boys, and it was through him and his sisters that he and Kate had first met. Marsden Manor was only a few miles from Bishop's Keep, the estate Kate had inherited from her aunts and where the Sheridans preferred to live, but they had not seen Bradford since the King's coronation the previous August. Charles was unaware that his friend had any connection to Marconi, but the knowledge didn't surprise him. Bradford, who spent all his time thinking of new ways to make money, owned an investment brokerage firm, sinking money into everything from diamond mines in Rhodesia (his wife, Edith, was Cecil Rhodes's goddaughter) to the new Royce automobiles. He no doubt viewed the Marconi Wireless Company, and Marconi himself, as an extraordinarily promising investment.

The door opened and Guglielmo Marconi—youthful, slender, lightly mustached and flawlessly dressed—entered the room, followed by an assistant with a large silver tea tray.

“Pleased to see you, Sheridan,” Marconi said. He nodded at Bradford. “I understand that you and Mr. Marsden are already acquainted. Has he mentioned that he is one of the directors of Marconi Wireless?” Marconi's English, while correct and unaccented, was couched in a formality which made it seem slightly foreign.

“He hasn't mentioned it yet.” Charles grinned at Bradford. “But I'm not at all surprised to hear it. The company looks to have an exciting future.”

“Remains to be seen,” Bradford replied cryptically.

Charles would like to have known what was behind Bradford's remark, but Marconi intervened. “Very well, gentlemen,” he said, gesturing to the tea tray left on a table. “Let us be seated. We shall have a cup of tea and catch ourselves up on what is new.”

Charles knew that Guglielmo was not yet thirty—he was still in his teens when he began his wireless experiments in the attic of his family's Italian villa—but his aloof, calculating manner and the controlled precision of his speech made him seem much older. Charles had always found him to be modest about his work and reticent when it came to trumpeting his achievements, so he was a little surprised when Marconi began their discussion of “what was new” by reciting a list of the last few months' accomplishments: the adoption of the Marconi system by the British and Italian navies, the construction of four new American Marconi stations, and the outfitting of another five transatlantic liners with Marconi equipment operated by Marconi-trained telegraphers from the school at Frinton, in Essex.

Marconi's glance at Bradford was an odd mixture of deference and defensiveness. “And not least,” he added, “we have got the Maggie perfected and production geared up to satisfy any demand.”

“Maggie” was the magnetic receiver the Marconi Company had patented the year before, reputedly the best of its kind—although Charles knew that the knotty problem of tuning out interfering signals had yet to be solved.

“I must say, that's all very impressive,” Charles remarked. “But I have the feeling that it isn't why I'm here today.”

“I was the one who asked Marconi to invite you, old man,” Bradford said, flicking his cigar into an ash tray. His sidelong glance at Marconi gave Charles to understand that there was some considerable tension between the two of them. Perhaps Bradford was not impressed by the recital of achievements, or he felt that his position as a director gave him the right to be Marconi's minder. He sipped his brandy. “We've encountered some rather serious problems, you see, and I thought of you.”