The Great Detective (3 page)

He did not look as though he had slept well.

A glance at the toast rack established that Mrs. Swindon had burnt the toast quite black. Tacy understood this as a sign that the coddled eggs were likely to be hard as rocks, but took one anyway, piled marmalade on the toast to counteract the taste of carbon, and poured herself a cup of lukewarm tea.

“Nothing from Mr. Holmes, I fear,” said Sir Arthur, “A letter from Mr. Slovinsky in Budapest, asking if his remarks on escapement pins were useful. I must have forgotten to write and thank him.”

Angharad gave a discordant chime. “There's dull you are, Arthur, with your endless mechanics! Can we not speak of something else? The agony column of the
Times
is full of interest this morning.” She leaned over the paper. “A gentleman has lost his mechanical dog in the fog, and a lady left her market basket on the Clapham bus. Full of eels it was, all alive-o—at least when she left them. Ah! Here's a wonder: a medical doctor, lately returned from Afghanistan.
Any decent employment considered
, it says. A story there is in that, sure as eggs. Medical men do not easily abandon their Hippocratic oaths.”

Sir Arthur, who had been surreptitiously reading his mail, gave a strangled cry and held up a sheet of heavy cream notepaper, his face alight. “From Mr. William Spottiswoode—the president of the Royal Society, you know—an invitation to luncheon! Perhaps he wishes me to speak at the symposium on artificial humanity.” He read further, his brow creasing. “This is odd. He most particularly asks me to bring Angharad with me.”

Angharad turned her doll-face upon him. “Does he? Well, you may write your Mr. President Spottiswoode and tell him the Ghost in the Machine declines to be questioned and poked at and taken to bits, like as not.”

Sir Arthur frowned. “I cannot write that to the president of the Royal Society!” he wailed. “Oh, this invitation could not have come at an unhappier time! What if he wants to see the Illogic Engine? And Mr. Holmes and his Reasoning Machine may be here at any moment!” He turned an anxious blue gaze on Tacy. “What am I to do?”

“Meet Mr. Spottiswoode for lunch, of course,” she said briskly. “And you must go with him, Angharad. Nobody who has spoken with you would think of taking you apart, not for any reason.”

Angharad was silent, glass eyes glimmering slightly. “Well. I'll charm the old noddlepate—for Arthur's sake, mind. It may be amusing.”

Tacy knew a moment of pity for Mr. Spottiswoode. “Not too amusing, I hope. Arthur, pray do not concern yourself over Mr. Holmes and his great detective. I will engage myself to answer any questions they may have.”

He smiled at her warmly. “Yes, of course. Bless you, Tacy. We shall go at once.”

*   *   *

After packing Angharad and Sir Arthur off to Burlington House in the steam carriage, Tacy retired to Sir Arthur's workshop, with the intention of doing a little investigating of her own.

The workshop had been a conservatory when Sir Arthur first took the house, roofed and walled with glass panes, its tile floor cluttered with dying ferns, orange trees in tubs, aspidistra, and sentimental marble statuary. Sir Arthur had replaced it all with bookshelves and tables covered with papers; mechanical instruments; tools; books strayed in from the library; and boxes of assorted gears, springs, escapements, fuses, and fittings. To Ethel, the workshop was a wilderness of tiny objects she was not allowed to move. To Tacy, it was a model of Sir Arthur's mind and hers. She knew precisely where she might lay her hand on any tool or paper she needed. Or at least she
had,
before Inspector Gregson had wantonly reduced it to a chaos of paper, brass, and steel.

Tacy picked up a box containing a set of miniature tools, set it on its shelf, gathered an armful of papers, and began to sort them.

As the clock in the church on the corner struck one, then two, Tacy worked steadily clearing the floor. By three, with the room restored to its usual state, Tacy set to examining the window latches with a hand lens. By four, when Swindon brought in the tea tray, she was spreading the inward parts of a guard mechanical across a workbench. Her hair had unraveled down her back, her skirt was streaked with oil and dust, and her cuffs were in a high state of grime.

At the clink of china on silver, she turned. “Oh, Swindon, it's you! Is Sir Arthur returned?”

“No, miss.”

“Any word from Mr. Holmes?”

“No, miss.”

She bit her lip impatiently. “I wonder what is keeping him?”

“I'm sure I don't know, miss.”

His tone was repressive, but Tacy was too distracted to notice. “I do wish he'd come. I have more data for him, or at least for that mechanical detective of his.” She turned suddenly. “You're a clever man, Swindon. Tell me what you think.”

The butler's small eyes widened. “I hardly think, Miss…”

“I've examined everything,” she went on, “doors, windows, floor—with a hand lens, look you. But apart from the fact of the missing Engine and its notes, I can find no sign of anyone other than ourselves—and Gregson, of course—having entered the room. Do you not think it curious, Swindon, that a thief should leave no trace at all?”

“No, miss,” said Swindon.

“Well, perhaps you are right. Only in romances are thieves so obliging as to leave piles of ash or flecks of mud or monogrammed pocket-handkerchiefs behind them.” She rubbed her forehead, smudging it with oil. “And then there's the question of the jammed mainsprings. Every clockwork object in the house, Swindon, saving only the kitchen clock, which runs on a pendulum. How could Gotobed possibly know how to jam them?”

She gazed expectantly at Swindon, who frowned. “Perhaps he learned the trick in prison, miss.”

“Perhaps he did. And perhaps he learned patience, as well. For, between the two of us, the Gotobed I knew was a vicious bully. Grievous bodily harm and destruction of property is what I'd expect from him, not a carefully plotted robbery.”

Swindon appeared to give the point some thought. “Perhaps Gotobed did not plot it.”

“Ah!” said Tacy. “Well-thought-of, Swindon! I wonder…” She fell silent, her eyes fixed on vacancy. Something hovered at the edge of her mind. If only Arthur would return! She always worked better when she was able to talk things over with him. He wasn't particularly clear-headed, but he was brilliantly intuitive. And kind, and dear, and … Oh, where
was
he?

“Will you drink your tea, miss?”

To her surprise, the supercilious butler sounded positively avuncular. She blinked at him. “Oh. Yes. Thank you, Swindon. I expect Sir Arthur and Mistress Angharad will be home any moment. Send them in when they come, will you?” She picked up a tiny turnscrew and bent over the workbench again.

At six, Swindon came to collect the tea tray and inquire whether Mrs. Swindon should hold dinner.

Tacy laid down the clarinet, with which she had been endeavoring to soothe her excited nerves. “Yes—wait, no. I'll take it here on a tray. I confess, I do not know what Sir Arthur is about, to stay so long with Mr. Spottiswoode when the fate of the Illogic Engine is still unknown!”

“As you say, miss.”

“Swindon,” she said impulsively, “you don't think anything could have happened to them, do you?”

Swindon's mouth tightened. “I shouldn't think so, miss. But I could send Ethel around to the Royal Society to inquire.”

Tacy shook her head. “Thank you, but no. I'll wait a little longer.”

And wait she did, as the workshop grew cold and her heart grew colder. Would stealing the Illogic Engine satisfy Gotobed's hunger for vengeance? Would he progress to abduction, even murder?

By the time Swindon brought in her tray, Tacy had made up her mind.

“Order a hackney carriage for me, Swindon, please. I am going to Pall Mall to consult Mr. Holmes.”

*   *   *

When Tacy reached Mr. Holmes's lodgings, the landlady informed her that the inventor was not at home. “He and that Reasoning Machine of his went out yesterday, and not a word have I heard since. The gentleman comes and goes like a mouse, with never a word to me. He'll be back when he's back, and not a moment before.”

If Tacy had been the kind of woman who wept with frustration, she would have wept then. As it was, she nodded briskly, hailed a mechanical two-wheeler, and directed it to drive her to the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police in Great Scotland Yard.
The police will listen
, she told herself firmly as the hansom whirred across St. James's Park.
They have to listen.

Listen they did—at least, to the extent of sending her up to Inspector Gregson's office without argument. Inspector Gregson, however, received her story with scant sympathy.

“Sir Arthur's late to dinner, is he?” he said with a rather offensive jollity. “No doubt he's still putting that fancy automaton of his through her paces.”

“Mistress Cwmlech is not an automaton,” Tacy said hotly. “She is a baronet's daughter and a lady.”

Gregson shrugged. “As long as she needs to be wound up with a key, she is not a person under the law, and I can take no official note of her absence—unless you wish to report her as stolen property?”

Tacy glared blue murder at him. “And what of Sir Arthur?”

Gregson leaned over his desk. “I will be frank, Miss Gof. Your standing in this matter is uncertain.”

“Uncertain!” Tacy exclaimed. “I am Sir Arthur's articled apprentice, sir!”

“Apprentice? Oh, come!” Gregson's tone was jocular. “Pretty young women are not commonly inventors' apprentices—particularly when the inventor's father was a notorious rake.”

Shaking with rage, Tacy rose to her feet. “There's a foul, low mind you keep between your ears, Inspector.”

“That's as may be,” said Gregson. “It's nothing to me if you're his inventive lordship's mistress. My superiors, however, take a dim view of females demanding attention to which they have no right.” He picked a piece of paper from the jumble on his desk. “If Sir Arthur and his automaton have not turned up in a day or two, you may send word. In the meantime, Miss Gof, I wish you a very good evening.”

*   *   *

That night, the mystery of Sir Arthur, Angharad, and the Illogic Engine kept Tacy tossing in her bed until, abandoning all thoughts of sleep, she drew a shawl over her night-dress and descended to the workshop. Winding up the heater, she aimed it at Sir Arthur's ratty leather club chair and settled in, determined to think through the case from the beginning.

Annoyingly, her mind drifted to the interview with Inspector Gregson. Mistress, indeed! Was that what the world thought? The idea was ridiculous. Why, Sir Arthur might have been her brother.
No
, she thought, oddly repelled—her cousin. Dear and much loved—as a relative is loved, of course. He and she worked well together, like perfectly balanced gears. If something had happened to him—or to Angharad or the Illogic Engine—she did not know how she would bear it.

All at once, she burst into a fit of weeping like a downpour in the mountains, all wind and water and thunder. When it exhausted itself, she fell into an uneasy doze and awoke at dawn feeling like a wrung-out tea towel.

A bath and breakfast of pheasant pie and porridge did much to revive her, and by half past seven, she was back in the workshop with a fresh pot of tea, a stack of foolscap, and the silver propelling pencil Arthur had given her for her birthday, ready to think about jammed mainsprings.

She began with a sketch of the bust Sir Arthur had made to house the Engine: a male head based on an antique model, articulated to reflect all the human emotions of fear, introspection, joy, anger, and love that the Engine would allow it to feel and express. It was not a beautiful or particularly natural-looking object. Sir Arthur's great gifts as an inventor lay in theory and design rather than aesthetics. Around the bust, she sketched the gears, escapements, springs, pins, pallets, and wheels that made up the Engine itself.

Having filled one sheet with sketches, she took up another for a list of things known to snap, stress, or otherwise wear mainsprings.
Dirt
, she wrote.
Excessive tension. Excessive motion. Sound waves.
She paused. Had she not recently read something on the subject of metallurgy and harmonics? She rubbed her forehead. So much had happened in the last two days. Oh, yes—the monograph. In the sitting room, it had been, waiting for Arthur to return from the Yard. The author was not familiar to her, but she was sure his name began with a C. Cantor? Cuspid?

Thanks to Gregson's sad effect on Ethel, the sitting room had not been dusted and the monograph still lay under the chair. Tacy snatched it up. Ah, yes. “The Effect of Sound Waves on Divers Alloys,” by Peter Cantrip, Esq.,
DSc(Oxon).
She carried it triumphantly downstairs and took up a fresh piece of paper.

Some time later, Swindon came in with a tray of sandwiches and fresh tea to find Tacy playing Welsh hymns on her clarinet.

As the tea cooled, Tacy played on, her fingers dancing over the silver keys while the scientific method, Amos Gotobed, revenge, music, theories of harmonics, artificial emotions, the process of building a mechanical, mainsprings, gears, and Angharad's insistence on clinging to her worn body danced through her mind, arranging and rearranging themselves into different patterns.

The clarinet dropped from her lips. Suddenly she knew, as if she had seen it, how the Engine had been stolen, and was a good way towards determining who had stolen it. Not Gotobed, whatever Gregson thought. What she needed was proof, and she thought she knew how she might get it. No inventor, once having the Illogic Engine in his hands, could resist trying to duplicate or even improve it. For that he would need materials, most particularly a certain finely-machined gear made to Sir Arthur's specifications by Steyne & Sons. Number 475-S, it was, the “S” for the ten tiny sapphires set in it to prevent wear. There were dozens of them in the Illogic Engine—and a pretty penny they'd cost, too. She'd teased Sir Arthur about buying jewels for his mistress until he hardly knew where to look, poor lamb.