Doktor Glass (7 page)

Langton bit back the first words that came to him, and said instead, “Perhaps.”

He realized then that McBride was right: Sarah’s possible fate had
distracted him from the murder case and made him neglect his duty. How could he do otherwise? His own wife. He had to know.

Perhaps there was a connection, after all: the Jar Boys. Langton could justify that to himself.

As the hansom neared the Pier Head, the driver had to weave through dense traffic. Langton saw great carts and steam wagons carrying cargoes to and from the docks: lumber from the Americas, marble from Italy, rolls of woven fabrics fresh from Manchester’s mills and destined for the colonies.

A constant din filled the air, composed of iron wheels on cobbles, engines’ roars, pistons pounding in their greased tracks. Over all this, the yells and curses of drivers. Like a wide, turbulent tributary, the traffic flowed toward the Mersey. And on either bank, pedestrians waited to cross; some took their chances and dived through the jostling wagons to reach the other side. Others, mainly ragged children, darted between and under the wheels, snatching what meager detritus fell from the jolted cargoes.

Langton held his breath when he saw a grimy, barefoot child of no more than six years scurry beneath the belly of an immense wagon. A blast of steam, a volley of curses, and then the child sprinted for the other side, clutching a fallen bundle. Iron-shod wheels taller than Langton missed the child by inches. Looking back from the hansom, Langton saw the child offer the scavenged bundle to a squat woman, who promptly slapped the child around the ear.

Soon the hansom rattled through vast gates of sandstone and wrought iron. Langton told the driver, “Wait here for us.”

Standing with McBride, Langton looked around at the frenetic activity. The colossal entrance ramp of the Span stood half a mile away on the site of the Canning Graving Docks, the stepped dry docks long ago filled in by the TSC. The ramp swept up from the Pier Head in a great curve of iron and steel and concrete, a graceful arc joining the land to the first support tower rising from the Mersey.

A shantytown had grown beneath the ramp, and smoke from the
encampment filtered through the bridge’s delicate struts and drifted toward the glass-and-wrought-iron edifice of the Span Company. Langton wondered how the Company’s directors liked having the poor, complaining masses so close to their feat of engineering.

Langton checked the time on the hexagonal tower that stood a few yards away with a clock on each face. Nine forty. They still had twenty minutes before his appointment. He asked a passing foreman for directions and led McBride across Albert Dock. Another man pointed to a low brick house near the stone edge of the dock facing the Mersey. The piermaster’s house, complete with small garden, seemed incongruous, more suited to a small town or village than a busy working dock. Not four yards away, steel hulls reared up like sheer, rusting cliffs.

Langton leaned inside the open top half of the door. “Mr. Perkins, please.”

A clerk scuttled into a side office. Perkins appeared at the door, pulling on his suit jacket. “Inspector? You’ve caught the robbers?”

“Not quite, Mr. Perkins. I wanted to ask you something.”

Perkins opened the bottom half of the door. “Only too pleased to help, Inspector.”

Langton stepped inside. “You were one of those around the body yesterday. Can you remember the others?”

“Let me see…Connolly, that loudmouthed agitator; you and your sergeant, naturally; the men with the stretcher.”

“And?”

“Oh, that sailor, the one who could hardly stand.”

“You remember his name?”

“Olsen, I believe.”

“And his ship?”

“I’m not—”

“His ship, Mr. Perkins.”

Perkins looked away. “The
Asención
.”

Langton nodded. “Perhaps you’ve heard of another death in the docks? A stabbing?”

Perkins mumbled into his chest.

“Pardon me, Mr. Perkins?”

“I had heard something, Inspector.”

Langton leaned a little closer to the assistant piermaster. “Why did you tell everyone, Perkins?”

Perkins puffed out his chest and seemed about to argue, then looked at Langton and sank in on himself. “I didn’t mean anything, Inspector, I swear I didn’t. We just got to talking, down the pub—I only go in for a half of bitter, maybe two, a glass of rum if the weather’s nippy. People had heard something had happened, and I let slip I’d been there, so—”

“Can you remember who was there?”

“It was full, Inspector. I couldn’t name everybody.”

Langton could imagine Perkins standing in the pub with a glass in his hand, telling everybody who would listen about the discovery of the faceless body. So keen to impress the drinking men with his inside knowledge.

“Let me offer you some advice, Mr. Perkins: Keep your own counsel. Share no more information with your friends down the public house, or anywhere else for that matter. I have no wish to investigate your own demise.”

Leaving behind Perkins’s apologies and protestations, Langton and McBride made for the offices of the Transatlantic Span Company. McBride asked, “How did you know it was him, sir?”

“I didn’t,” Langton said. “At least, I wasn’t sure. Only two men outside the force knew about Olsen: Connolly and Perkins. Only Perkins knew which ship the stoker sailed on. And I wondered whether Perkins had that type of personality which might crave attention.”

Avoiding a swinging net of grain sacks, McBride said, “So there was someone in that pub who wanted to keep Olsen quiet, or who told someone else who wanted to silence any witnesses.”

“Exactly.” Langton didn’t continue his logic: that whoever had wanted to silence Olsen, presumably the same man who had killed the
Boer, couldn’t have known Perkins would go to that particular pub and repeat the valuable information; either it had been pure chance or the murderer had some kind of network of informants. That implied organization. It implied a dangerous sophistication.

Langton and McBride waited in the marble lobby of the Span Company until the receptionist allowed them into a gilt elevator. The uniformed attendant took them to the top floor, where a man in a tailcoat bowed and ushered them into a cavernous office. “Lord Salisbury, sir? Inspector Langton and, ah, associate.”

“Gentlemen.” The man behind the enormous desk stood up but didn’t offer to shake hands. He nodded to the visitors’ chairs opposite and said, “How may I be of service?”

As he sat, Langton saw that the offered chairs lay slightly below the level of the desk, giving Lord Salisbury the advantage of looking down on his visitors. “There must be some mistake, your lordship. Our appointment was with your director of labor.”

Salisbury waved the point away. “This unfortunate accident affects the entire Company, Inspector, and its many shareholders. Anything that reduces public confidence in our endeavor must be dealt with quickly and tactfully. As I explained to your chief constable this morning, I hope my personal involvement will speed the process.”

That gave Langton much to think about. Why would the chairman of the Span Company want to squash this investigation? Not only for the shareholders. “Forgive me, your lordship, but it was no simple accident. It was murder. The injuries to the body confirm this.”

Salisbury frowned. “A modern screw propeller could have caused the lacerations. I myself have seen the terrible damage such blades can inflict.”

Langton knew he was on delicate ground. “I’m sure you are correct, your lordship, but in this instance the man’s face was removed carefully and precisely. And certain other…signs indicate a deliberate and painful death.”

Salisbury stared at Langton. “You gainsay me, sir?”

Langton stared back. “I’m afraid I have no choice.”

From McBride, a quick intake of breath. Langton looked into Salisbury’s eyes without blinking. After what seemed like an eternity, Lord Salisbury nodded and sat back with his hands forming a steeple on his waistcoat. “What makes you think the man worked for us, Inspector?”

“His clothes, your lordship, and he carried a key of a strange design, possibly a watchman’s or security guard’s time key, with the outline of a bridge engraved upon it.”

Lord Salisbury nodded and reached for one of the red ledgers stacked on his desk. “As usual, we’re missing at least a dozen workers, men who think it right and fair to laze in their beds rather than complete an honest day’s work.”

He riffled pages and plucked out a handwritten sheet. “Here we are: navigators, joiners, fitters, and cablemen. And one security guard and night watchman: Abel Kepler.”

“No doubt he would carry a time key like the one we discovered,” Langton said.

“I presume so.”

That had to be the one. “You have Kepler’s address, your lordship?”

Salisbury pushed the note toward McBride and dismissed him, saying, “You’ll find the director of labor on the third floor. Tell him I sent you.”

After McBride had left the office, Salisbury beckoned Langton to the windows. “Look at her, Inspector: the engineering marvel of the century. The Company owns all these docks, all these piers, warehouses, and wharves, but she is the jewel.”

Salisbury’s plush quarters offered a superb view of the Span. Sunlight glinted on iron and steel, on the sweeping catenary support pipes strung between the vast towers, and on the delicate vertical cables holding the road and rail deck; the polished electric rails glimmered like silver threads.

Langton had never been this close to the structure. The angular bas-relief figures on the first tower’s Egyptian-themed frieze dwarfed him.
From this angle, the first tower, with its crown lost in cloud, looked like a mythic pillar supporting heaven. “It’s very impressive, your lordship.”

“More than impressive, Inspector: stupendous.” Salisbury rested one hand against the glass as if reaching out to touch his creation. “For thirty years have I dreamed of this. Thirty years. Engineer after engineer failed until the Brunels stepped forward. Whole countries were quarried to supply the foundations and facings of those towers. Those beams and cables carry steel from every foundry in the empire. The Span is more than a mere bridge, Langton; it is an emblem. A symbol. Nothing is beyond us. Nature is at our command.”

Then, before Langton could ask where the various dispossessed families camped below fitted into the design, Salisbury turned to him and said, “Yet all this could fail. Those foundations rest on a mountain of pound notes and promissory papers, the deposits of hundreds of thousands of investors. Yet if one—just one—of those investors loses his nerve, the whole beautiful edifice could collapse. All because of a simple whiff of scandal. I must not let that happen, Inspector.”

Salisbury stepped closer. His eyes burned. “In four days’ time Her Majesty the Queen will open the Span. Nothing must prevent that. Nothing.”

*  *  *

A
S HE WAITED
for McBride in the lobby, Langton wondered why Lord Salisbury had taken the time and effort to warn him, indeed to threaten him. Langton would have to choose his path with care; Salisbury could prove a powerful enemy.

“They gave me the address, sir,” McBride said as he descended the marble staircase and followed Langton outside. He drew a typewritten sheet from his jacket and said, “Abel Samuel John Kepler. Forty-seven years old, unmarried. Joined the Span Company almost six months ago. Currently lodging in Gloucester Road in Bootle.”

The text confirmed McBride’s words but also added to them. “Who’s this? Peter Durham?”

“Another Span fella, sir, a daytime security guard who bunks at the same lodgings as Kepler. Seems he joined the same day as our man, too.”

More coincidence. “Durham wasn’t on Lord Salisbury’s absentee list, so I suppose he must have arrived for work today…”

McBride grinned. “Happens he did, sir. He’s over on pier three in the King’s Dock, the clerk said. Seems that the Span owns a fair chunk of the Mersey waterfront.”

As Langton followed the signs toward the King’s Dock adjacent to Albert Dock, he wondered how the ship owners and liner companies regarded Lord Salisbury and the Transatlantic Span. After all, the bridge would rob them of millions of pounds of cargo and passenger revenues; it might put many of them out of business altogether. Could they be behind Kepler?

Langton considered that a remote possibility. He and McBride avoided the trundling carts laden with cargoes of sacks, timber, and bundles, and dodged between swaying towers of crates. All the while, the background bedlam of the docks assaulted them: yells, curses, the pounding of steam winches, the shrill cries of ships’ whistles and horns. Even the odd flurry of song.

They crossed a narrow bridge set above stout wooden sluice gates between the docks and the river, then pushed through a crowded wharf to pier three. Langton questioned a wizened man with a clipboard, who pointed to the roadway linking one pier to the next. “That’s Durham, the fella checking the bales on the way out.”

Langton saw a tall, well-built man with broad shoulders, tanned skin, and an unkempt moustache. But the man saw Langton, too. Before the inspector could cross the busy pier, the security guard turned and dropped the ledger. His hand dipped into his pocket and emerged with a black pistol. The shot split the air and drove every man to the floor.

Instinct made Langton dive behind a stack of crates. He waited for another but heard instead the clatter of boots on cobbles. He saw Durham running toward the Albert Dock, back the way Langton had come.

Sprinting after Durham, Langton yelled to McBride, “Are you armed?”

McBride shook his head. Langton cursed and focused on the fleeing man; he could see his own ex-army Webley revolver still in his bedside drawer at home.

Almost at the bridge above the dock gates, Durham turned, sighted, and fired. Langton kept running, keeping his head as low as he could while simultaneously cursing his stupidity. Another shot boomed. He didn’t stop.

Bells rang out in warning as a ship approached the dock gates from the River Mersey. White water roared through the open sluices. As the gates began to part, the narrow bridge crossing their apex split in the middle. The gap widened: a foot; a yard; almost two yards.