The Riddle of the River (30 page)

‘It’s Morse code,’ breathed the constable admiringly. ‘This machine sends and that one receives. And she says it’ll work even if they’re miles apart.’

Inspector Doherty was not slow to understand. The officer’s description too clearly corresponded to the missing link in the case against Julian Archer that we had discussed at such length. He glanced at me, raising his eyebrows. I gave a quick nod towards Julian. His eyes followed my look.

‘The body?’ he asked.

‘The father,’ I answered at once. He hesitated no longer, but turned to Julian Archer, taking the handcuffs from the constable as he did so.

‘You are under arrest for the murder of Ivy Elliott,’ he said. ‘You will accompany me to the police station at once.’ And the two policemen hustled Julian out of the door. ‘I’ll thank you to join us there as soon as you can, Mrs Weatherburn,’ the inspector threw back at me over his shoulder as he disappeared. ‘We will need your statement.’

The street door banged below, and an odd silence established itself in the dim bedroom. Then the neighbours began leaving, gathering together and disappearing little by little down the narrow stair with the fluidity of a stream. Arthur and I remained together in the darkness. I looked around for Philip, but he was gone; I heard his steps going up the stairs to his own rooms, creakingly, wearily. Thump, drag, pause. Thump, drag, pause. Thump, drag, pause. There was a little swish, and a quick step suddenly followed his. Perhaps Jenny could find some peace in those rooms upstairs, darkened by the mourning that she shared.

I let my head sink onto Arthur’s shoulder. He made a gentle attempt to restore some symmetry to my hair.

‘I don’t want to go,’ I said.

‘You must finish what you began,’ he replied. ‘They need to
know what you know, Vanessa. What about the other man, the father? Where is he?’

‘He’s on a yacht,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how you arrest a person on a yacht.’

‘They watch all the ports,’ he said.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ I said, ‘that until today one might have thought that it was absolutely impossible to communicate with someone on a boat. This machine will change all that – it will change the world around us more than we can imagine. It is the most modern thing I have ever seen.’

I reached out and pressed the little round button one last time. Together we watched the flash of the spark, and the reaction of the other machine as the invisible wave crossed the air. The metal dust flew together, and the little printer stolidly grunted out its single dot. The spoon tapped, the dust fell, and all became quiet.

‘This truly marks the end of an era,’ I said.

‘Come along,’ said Arthur, touching my elbow. ‘We must go.’

‘You’re coming with me, aren’t you?’ I said.

‘Of course,’ he answered, linking his arm through mine.

The passages in italics contained between each day’s diary entry, describing the childhood and youth of the Italian-Irish inventor Guglielmo Marconi, leading up to the day of his extraodinary triumph at the Kingstown Regatta on July 20th, 1898, are all entirely historical and were researched from various biographies and articles on Marconi.

Marconi’s career as an inventor and businessman continued brilliantly, Cross-channel transmission was achieved in 1899; an article from
McClure’s Magazine
, authored by one Cleveland Moffatt and dated June 1899 is blazingly entitled: ‘Messages sent at will through space – telegraphing without wires across the English channel’. The article begins: ‘Mr Marconi began his endeavors at telegraphing without wires in 1895, when in the fields of his father’s estate at Bologna, Italy, he set up tin boxes, called “capacities,” on poles of varying heights, and connected them by insulated wires with the instruments he had then devised – a crude transmitter and receiver. Here was a young man of twenty hot on the track of a great discovery, for presently he is writing to Mr W. H. Preece, chief electrician of the British postal system, telling him about these tin boxes and how he has found out that “when these were placed on top of a pole two metres high, signals could be obtained at thirty metres
from the transmitter”; and that “with the same boxes on poles four metres high signals were obtained at 100 metres and with the same boxes at a height of eight metres, other conditions being equal, nearly up to a mile and a half. Morse signals were easily obtained at 400 metres.” And so on, the gist of it being (and this is the chief point in Marconi’s present system) that the higher the pole (connected by wire with the transmitter), the greater was found to be the distance of transmission.’ In fact, as was later discovered, the height of the pole is not directly correlated to the distance of the transmission; rather, this distance increases because of the stronger currents and longer wavelengths resulting from a larger antenna’s greater electrical capacity. In December 1901, he received the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission, from Poldhu, Cornwall to Newfoundland, Canada, using a 400-foot kite-supported antenna. Over the coming years, Marconi was responsible for the equipping of all ships with radios, although unfortunately the ships’ radio operators went off duty at night; however, one chance operator still at work caught the last messages from the sinking Titanic in 1912 and his ship was able to rescue those survivors who had managed to get into lifeboats.

Before Marconi’s work, several other brilliant physicists and inventors had managed to detect waves at distances of a few yards, such as Edouard Branly, Heinrich Hertz, Alexander Popov and of course, Sir Oliver Lodge. The latter was, as described, a passionate believer in telepathy and communication with the dead, a member and sometime president of the British Society for Psychical Research; much later, after the sad death of his son Raymond in World War I, Lodge wrote
Raymond, or Life and Death
, a book which
begins with an account of Raymond’s youth, continues with a description of the family’s successful attempts to contact him after his death through mediums, and ends with a discourse on Lodge’s philosophy about the Afterlife. The concerns of the British Psychical Society and the scientific study and analysis of séances in the Victorian era are faithfully represented; the brochure and Faraday’s article explaining table-turning as a result of unconscious movements on the part of the participants are true documents.

The Darwin family – and their house, and their granary, and their bicycle, and their telephone – are real people who resided in the house which now forms Darwin College; all these things are described in the delightful autobiography of Gwen Raverat née Darwin,
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
. Finally, many thanks are due to Mr Peter Kenyon, whose critical advice was useful in innumerable places, above all in ensuring that all travel described in the book, whether by carriage, train or steamer, could have occurred at the tail end of the nineteenth century exactly as described.

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C
ATHERINE
S
HAW
is an academic and a mathematician. She has written four Vanessa Weatherburn mysteries as well as
How to Solve Sudoku & Kakuro.
Her first novel,
The Three Body Problem,
was shortlisted for the Debut Dagger Award. She lives in Paris, France.

The Riddle of the River

The Library Paradox

Flowers Stained with Moonlight

The Three Body Problem

Other

How to Solve Sudoku & Kakuro