RC01 - The Railway Detective Read online

  ‘Yes, Humphrey. I recall how you opposed his Railway Bill.’

  ‘It was a matter of honour. To return to Paxton,’ he said. ‘When our landscape gardener discovered how poor the acoustics were in the House of Commons, he decried the architect, Mr Barry. He then went on to say that those designing the hall for the Great Exhibition would also botch the job – even though he had not seen their plans.’

  ‘Mr Paxton is an arrogant man, by the sound of it.’

  ‘Arrogant?’ said Gilzean, scornfully. ‘The fellow has a conceit to rival Narcissus. At a meeting of the board of his railway company, he had the gall to sketch his idea for the building on a piece of blotting paper. That, Thomas, is how this Crystal Palace came into being.’

  ‘On a piece of blotting paper?’

  ‘The design was shown to Ellis, who passed it on to someone in authority and, the next thing you know, Paxton is invited to submit a plan and an estimate of its cost. To cap it all,’ said Gilzean through gritted teeth, ‘he is given an audience with Prince Albert himself. His Royal Highness was not the only one to approve of the design. Paxton managed to win the support of no less a personage than Robert Stephenson.’ He arched an imperious eyebrow. ‘The two of them met – appropriately enough – during a train journey to London.’

  ‘The railway has a lot to answer for, Humphrey.’

  ‘More than you know,’ returned the other. ‘In the early days, when we were doing our best to oppose the scheme, it looked as if the Great Exhibition might not even take place. It was dogged by all sorts of financial problems. Then in steps Mr Peto, the railway contractor, and offers to act as guarantor for the building by putting down £50,000. Once he had led the way,’ said Gilzean, ‘others quickly followed. Mr Peto also put his weight behind the choice of Paxton as the architect.’

  ‘At every stage,’ noted Sholto, ‘crucial decisions have been made by those connected with the railways. You can see how they stand to reap the benefit. When the Exhibition opens, excursion trains will run from all over the country. Railway companies will make immense profits.’

  ‘Not if I can help it, Thomas.’

  ‘The men are in readiness.’

  ‘They had better not repeat their failure at the Kilsby Tunnel.’

  ‘After what you said to them, Humphrey, they would not dare. They are still shaking. You put the fear of God into them.’

  ‘They deserved it.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Sholto. ‘Have you chosen the day yet?’

  ‘Thursday next.’

  ‘I’ll give them their orders.’

  ‘No, Thomas,’ said Gilzean, folding up the floor plan, ‘I’ll do that myself. I intend to be at my town house in London this week. I want to hear those locomotives being blown apart.’

  ‘They’ll take a large part of the Crystal Palace with them. That glass is very fragile. It will shatter into millions of shards.’ Sholto laughed harshly. ‘A pity that it will happen in darkness – it should be a wondrous sight. Farewell to the Great Exhibition!’

  ‘Farewell to the Lord of the Isles and all those other locomotives,’ said Gilzean, bitterly. I’ll never forgive the railways for what they did to me. My ambition is to act as a scourge to the whole damnable industry.’

  The meeting was not accidental. As she came out of the shop, Madeleine Andrews was confronted by Gideon Little, who pretended that he was about to go in. Since he lived half a mile away, and had several shops in the vicinity of his house, there was no need for him to be in Camden at all. After greeting Madeleine, he invented an excuse.

  ‘I thought of calling on your father again,’ he said, diffidently.

  ‘He is asleep, Gideon. It is not a good time to visit.’

  ‘Then I’ll come another time.’

  ‘Father is always pleased to see you.’

  ‘What about you, Madeleine?’

  ‘I, too, am pleased,’ she said, briskly. ‘I believe that any friend of Father’s is welcome at our house, especially if he is a railwayman.’

  ‘I am not talking about Caleb,’ he said, quietly.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then why do you not answer my question?’

  There was a long and uncomfortable pause. When she walked to the end of the street to buy some provisions, Madeleine had not expected to be cornered by a man whose devotion to her had reached almost embarrassing proportions. She had tried, in the past, to discourage him as gently as she could but Gideon Little had a keen ally in her father and a quiet tenacity that drove him on past all her of rebuffs. Madeleine had the uneasy feeling that he had been lurking outside the house in case she came out.

  ‘Why are you not at work?’ she asked.

  ‘I was on the early shift today.’

  ‘Then you must be very tired.’

  ‘Not when I have a chance to see you, Madeleine.’ He offered a hand. ‘Let me carry your bag for you.’

  ‘No, thank you. I can manage.’

  He was hurt. ‘Will you not even let me do that?’

  ‘I have to go, Gideon.’

  ‘No,’ he said, stepping sideways to block her path, ‘you have walked away from me once too often, Madeleine, and it has to stop. I think it’s time you gave me an answer.’

  ‘You know the answer,’ she said, seeing the mingled hope and determination in his eyes. ‘Do I really have to put it in words?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Gideon – ‘

  ‘At the very least, I deserve that. It’s been two years now,’ he told her. ‘Two years of waiting, wanting, making plans for the two of us.’

  ‘They were your plans – not ours.’

  ‘Will you not even listen to what they are?’

  ‘No,’ she said with polite firmness. ‘There would be no point.’

  ‘Why are you so unkind to me? Do you hate me that much?’

  ‘Of course not, Gideon. I like you. I always have. But the plain truth is – and you must surely realise this by now – that I can never see you as anything more than a friend.’

  ‘Never?’ he pleaded.

  ‘Never, Gideon.’

  Madeleine did not want to be so blunt with him but she had been left with no choice. Her father’s condition gave Gideon Little an opportunity to call at the house on a regular basis, and he would try to urge his suit each time. The prospect dismayed Madeleine. It was better to risk offending him now than to let him harry her and build up his expectations. Wounded by her rejection, Little stared at her in disbelief, as if she had just thrust a dagger into him. His pain slowly gave way to a deep resentment.

  ‘You were not always so cruel to me, Madeleine,’ he said.

  ‘You asked for the truth.’

  ‘We were real friends once.’

  ‘We still are, Gideon.’

  ‘No,’ he said, glaring at her. ‘Since Caleb was injured, something has changed. You no longer have any interest in me. A fireman on the railway is beneath you now.’

  ‘Let me go past, please.’

  ‘Not until we settle this. You’ve met someone else, Madeleine.’

  ‘I have to get back.’

  ‘Someone you think is better than me. Don’t lie,’ he said, holding up a hand before she could issue a denial. ‘Your father has noticed it and so have I. When you went to see Inspector Colbeck for the second time, I followed you. I saw the way you looked at him.’

  Madeleine was furious. ‘You followed me?’

  ‘I knew that you wanted to see him again.’

  ‘You had no right to do that.’

  ‘Caleb told me how you behaved when the Inspector came to the house. He said that you put your best dress on for him. You never did that for me, Madeleine.’

  ‘This has gone far enough, Gideon,’ she asserted. ‘Following me? That’s dreadful. How could you do such a thing?’

  ‘I wanted to see where you were going.’

  ‘What I do and where I go is my business. The only reason I spoke to Inspector Colbeck again is that he is investigat
ing the train robbery in which Father was injured.’

  ‘Yet you never even mentioned it to Caleb,’ said Gideon, hands on his hips. ‘When I asked him if you had been back to Whitehall, he shook his head. Why did you mislead him, Madeleine?’

  ‘Never you mind,’ she said, flustered.

  ‘But I do mind. This means a lot to me.’

  Madeleine tried to move. ‘Father will be expecting me.’

  ‘You told me that he was asleep.’

  ‘I want to be there when he wakes up.’

  ‘Why?’ he challenged, obstructing her path. ‘Are you going to admit that you went out of your way to see Inspector Colbeck again because you like him so much?’

  ‘No,’ she retorted. ‘I am going to tell him that I do not want you in the house again. I’m ashamed of you for what you did, Gideon.’ She brushed past him. ‘I will not be spied on by anyone.’

  ‘Madeleine!’ he cried, suddenly penitent.

  ‘Leave me be.’

  ‘I did not mean to upset you like that.’

  But she was deaf to his entreaties. Hurrying along the pavement, she reached her house, let herself in and closed the door firmly behind her. Gideon Little had no doubt what she felt about him now.

  On the third night, Victor Leeming’s faith in the Inspector began to weaken slightly. It was well past midnight at the Crystal Palace and there had been neither sight nor sound of any intruders. Leeming feared that they were about to have another long and uneventful vigil.

  ‘Are you sure that they will come, sir?’ he whispered.

  ‘Sooner or later,’ replied Colbeck.

  ‘Let someone else take over from us.’

  ‘Do you want to miss all the excitement, Victor?’

  ‘There’s been precious little of that so far, Inspector. We’ve had two nights of tedium and, since the place is in darkness, we cannot even divert ourselves by looking at the exhibits. Also,’ he complained, shifting his position, ‘it is so uncomfortable here.’

  Colbeck grinned. ‘I did not have time to instal four-poster beds.’

  The detectives were in one of the massive exhibition halls, concealed behind Liverpool, a standard gauge locomotive designed for the London and North Western Railway by Thomas Crampton. Built for high speed, it had eight foot driving wheels and an unprecedentedly large heating surface. Having learnt its specifications, Colbeck had passed them to Leeming in the course of the first night, trying in vain to interest his Sergeant in the facts that the boiler pressure was 120 per square inch and that the cylinders were 18 by 24 inches. All that Leeming wanted was to be at home in bed with his wife, whose total ignorance of locomotives he now saw as a marital blessing.

  ‘I think that Liverpool has a chance of winning a gold medal,’ said Colbeck, giving the engine a friendly pat. ‘That would really annoy Daniel Gooch at the Great Western.’

  ‘I think that we deserve a gold medal for keeping watch like this,’ said Leeming, yawning involuntarily. ‘Mr Tallis had a feeling that we’d be chasing shadows.’

  ‘Try to get some sleep, Victor.’

  ‘On a floor as hard as this?’

  ‘In any surveillance operation, you have to make the best of the conditions that you are given. We are, after all, indoors,’ said Colbeck. ‘Would you rather be outside in all that drizzle?’

  ‘No, Inspector.’

  ‘Then cheer up a little. We could be on the brink of an arrest.’

  ‘Then again,’ said Leeming under his breath, ‘we could not.’

  ‘Go on, Victor. Put your head down.’

  ‘There’s no point.’

  ‘Yes, there is. You need some sleep.’

  ‘What about you, Inspector?’

  ‘I prefer to stay on duty. If anything happens, I’ll wake you.’

  ‘And if nothing happens?’

  ‘In that case,’ said Colbeck, beaming, ‘you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren that you once slept beneath one of the finest locomotives of its day. Good night, Victor. Remember not to snore.’

  There were three of them. Having studied the plan that had been obtained for them by Sir Humphrey Gilzean, they were familiar with the layout of the Great Exhibition. Their leader, Arthur Jukes, a big bulky man in his thirties with ginger whiskers, had taken the precaution of visiting the site on the previous night to reconnoitre the area and to look for potential hazards. They were few in number. Security was light and the guards who patrolled the exterior of the Crystal Palace could be easily evaded. As he and his companions crouched in their hiding place, Jukes had no qualms about the success of the operation.

  ‘We should’ve done it last night,’ said Harry Seymour, the youngest of the three. ‘When it wasn’t so bleeding wet.’

  ‘This drizzle will help us, Harry. It will put the guards off. They’ll want to stay in the dry with a pipe of baccy.’

  ‘So would I, Arthur.’

  ‘You ready to tell that to Sir Humphrey?’

  Seymour trembled. ‘Not me!’

  ‘Nor me,’ said his brother, Vernon, the third of the men. ‘It was bad enough facing Tom Sholto after that mishap at the Kilsby Tunnel. But Sir Humphrey was far worse,’ he recalled with a grimace. ‘I thought he was going to horsewhip us.’

  ‘He’ll do more than that if we fail,’ said Harry Seymour.

  Jukes was confident. ‘No chance of that,’ he boasted, looking to see of the coast was clear. ‘Are you ready, lads?’

  ‘Ready,’ said the brothers in unison.

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  Keeping low and moving swiftly, Jukes headed for the entrance to the north transept. Harry and Vernon Seymour followed him, carrying a barrel of gunpowder between them in a large canvas bag with rope handles. The three of them reached the door without being seen. Jukes had brought a lamp with him and he used it to illumine the lock so that he could work away at it with his tools. In less than a minute, it clicked open and he eased the door back on its hinges. The three of them went quickly inside. Jukes immediately closed the metal cover on the lamp so that the flame would not be reflected in the vast acreage of glass that surrounded them. Having memorised the floor plan, he knew exactly where to go.

  Shutting the door behind them, they paused to take their bearings. In the gloom of the transept, everything was seen in ghostly outline. High above them, under a film of drizzle, was the magnificent arched roof of the transept, so tall that it allowed trees to continue growing beneath it, thereby providing an outdoor element in an essentially indoor space. Ahead of them, they knew, was the refreshment court and, beyond that, heard but not seen, was the first of the fountains that had been built. Harry Seymour remembered something else he had seen on the plan.

  ‘We go past the exhibits from India,’ he noted.

  ‘So what?’ said his brother.

  ‘We could look at that stuffed elephant they got.’

  ‘I saw enough real ones when we was over there, Harry.’

  ‘So did I,’ added Jukes, ‘and we’re not here to admire the place. We got orders. Let’s obey them and be quick about it.’

  Followed by the two brothers, he swung to the right and took a pathway that led between statues, exhibits and the forest of iron pillars that supported the structure. They did not even pause beside the stuffed elephant with its opulent howdah. Their interest was in the section devoted to Railways and Steam. It was in between an area set aside for Machinery in Motion and one shared by Printing and French Machinery, and Models and Naval Architecture. By the time that the shape of the first locomotive emerged from the darkness, all three of them were feeling a rush of exhilaration. They were about to earn a lot of money.

  After peering at the various exhibits, Jukes stood beside one of the biggest on display and ran a hand over it. He was satisfied.

  ‘This is the one,’ he declared.

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Harry Seymour.

  ‘Because I can feel the name with my fingers. This is the Lord of the Isles. Put that gunpowder unde
rneath her, lads, then we’ll blow her to smithereens.’

  ‘Let me light the fuse this time, Arthur.’

  ‘Nobody is lighting any fuse,’ shouted Colbeck.

  ‘Not when I’m in here, at any rate,’ said Brendan Mulryne, popping up in the tender and vaulting to the ground. ‘Now which one of you bastards was ready to send me to my Maker?’

  Colbeck marched towards them. ‘All three of you are under arrest,’ he said with Victor Leeming at his side. ‘Handcuff them, Sergeant.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector.’

  But the three men were not going to surrender easily. Swinging the barrel between them, the Seymour Brothers hurled it at Mulryne but he caught it as if it were as light as a feather. He was thrilled that the men were ready to fight. With a roar of delight, he put the barrel down, jumped forward, grabbed them both by their throats and flung them hard against the side of the locomotive. When they tried to strike back, Mulryne hit them in turn with heavy punches that sent them to their knees. Leeming stepped in quickly to handcuff the two captives.

  Jukes, meanwhile, had opted to run for it, blundering his way into an area where visitors to the exhibition would be able to see machines in action as they spun flax and silk or made lace. Colbeck went after him. Although he was armed with a pistol, he did not wish to risk firing it inside the glass structure in case it caused damage. Jukes was fast but he was in unknown territory. Colbeck, on the other hand, had visited the Crystal Palace in daylight and had some idea of where the exhibits were placed. While one man collided with heavy items, the other was able to avoid them.

  He overhauled Jukes by the rope-making machine, tackling him around the legs to bring him crashing to the ground. Swearing volubly, Jukes kicked him away and tried to get to his feet but Colbeck tripped him up again before flinging himself on top of the man. They grappled fiercely for a couple of minutes, each inflicting injuries on the other. With an upsurge of energy, Colbeck was eventually able to get in some telling punches to subdue his man. Bloodied and dazed, Jukes put up both hands to protect his face from further punishment.