Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

“Tried for a job. Just digging, that was all. Foundations for a signal box. But they’d already-”

“Robbie,” she cut in. “Go now, please. Go.”

He gawped at her. “But why?”

A door had opened on the other side of the porter’s trolley. A man laughed. A cloud of cigar smoke wafted through the air.

Mary gripped his arm. “Too late. Look at that notice. You don’t know me.”

“You’ve lost your wits.”

“Just do as I say.”

He turned away and pretended to study a notice concerning the transport of livestock on the Great Western Railway. The fact that he could read it all was due to Mary’s mother. Several gentlemen emerged through the doorway. They exchanged farewells and most of them strolled through the archway to waiting carriages.

But two of the gentlemen lingered. Side by side, cigars in hand, they surveyed the seething crowds. Porters shouted and cursed. Trains murmured and hissed and rattled. The sounds rose to the high vault of the roof.

“Ten years ago this wasn’t here, Sir John,” said the younger and smaller of the two. “Twenty years ago it was barely conceivable. Thirty years ago it would have been beyond the wildest dreams of an opium eater.”

“Impressive, I grant you,” answered his companion, a white-haired gentleman of perhaps sixty years of age. “But the noise is intolerable.”

“Noise? Yes, indeed. It’s the sound that money makes. The Great Western Railway has restored prosperity to the towns it touches. Railways are the arteries of wealth. As you yourself will discover, I trust, when the Lydmouth and Borders Railway is built.”

“You go too fast for me, sir.”

“Because there is no time to waste!” cried the younger man, waving his cigar. “The fruit hangs ripening on the tree. If we do not pluck it, then someone else will. Which is why my directors and I are so desirous of your joining us on the board. Where Sir John Ruispidge leads, other men will follow. Your position in the county, sir, your influence with the administration, your friends in Parliament-you have it in your power to smooth our way considerably and, I may add, to reap a just reward for doing so. Once the line is built, you may transport your coal at a fraction of the price you now pay, and at many times the speed. The general prosperity the railways bring-the freer movement of people and capital-cannot but have a benevolent effect on the fortunes of all those concerned.”

“Ah, but the investment must be considerable. Nothing will come of nothing, as the Bard tells us.”

“I speak from experience. You must allow me to show you the figures from South Devon.” There was another wave of the cigar. “And consider the convenience of it. You will be able to travel from your country seat to your house in town within a day, and in the utmost comfort. If Lady Ruispidge desires quails in aspic from Fortnum’s, they could be on her table within a few hours.”

“You are a persuasive advocate.” Sir John took out his watch. “Alas, I must leave you until tomorrow.”

“Good God! Is that a Breguet watch?”

“It is indeed. You have sharp eyes, Mr. Brunel.”

Robbie’s eyes swung towards the little man. The great Brunel himself!

“I trust I have a sharp eye for any piece of machinery so elegantly conceived and finely constructed as one of Monsieur Breguet’s watches. But in this case I have a personal interest. My father sent me as a very young man to work for Monsieur Breguet in Paris. He told me there was no better person from whom I might learn what I needed.”

Watch in hand, Ruispidge bowed. “Your father was indeed a man of perspicacity.”

The watch was dangling on its chain from the old man’s hand, swinging to and fro like a pendulum, coming perilously close to the wall. Mr. Brunel, Robbie thought, was growing agitated for the watch’s safety.

At that moment, the world tilted on its axis and became an entirely different place. Mary came to life. His friend Mary, whom Robbie had known since he was a child in short-coats; who had played the part of sister to him for most of his life; who went to church at least once, usually twice, on Sundays-his friend Mary, with whom he was more than half in love-well, she picked up her cloak and skirt with her left hand and ran forward, keening like a madwoman.

She snatched the old man’s watch from his hand. Sir John and Mr. Brunel froze, both with their cigars moving towards their open mouths. Mary dived into the crowded station yard, dodging among the carriages and horses and wagons until she was lost in the seething mass of humanity.

Robbie Trevine lodged above a cobbler’s near the market, where they let him sleep under the rafters in return for sweeping floors and running errands. By the time he had finished his jobs for the evening, the sky was darkening. He slipped out of the house and made his way to Hotwells, to the damp and crowded house by the river where Mary and her mother lodged in a tiny room up four pairs of stairs.

Mary opened the door. When she saw him, she stepped back to allow him into the room. He glanced towards the curtained alcove beside the empty fireplace.

“She’s asleep,” Mary whispered. “The doctor gave her something.”

“Give my love when she wakes.”

Robbie reckoned that Mrs. Linnet had given him more love than his own mother, though that wasn’t hard because, when he was three years old, his mother had gone off for a few days’ holiday with a Liverpool publican and never come back.

Mary’s face was impossible to read in that shadowy room. “I was afraid you’d come.”

“Why did you do it? Why did you steal the gent’s watch at the station?”

“I had to do something. The doctor don’t come cheap, and Ma needs medicines, and proper food. The nurse is coming back later this evening. It all costs money.”

“But if they catch you-”

“They won’t.”

“But selling something stolen is almost as risky as taking it in the first place.”

She shrugged and turned her head away from him. “There’s someone I know.”

“This isn’t the first time, is it?”

Mary said nothing. They listened to the breathing of the sick woman.

Robbie said: “I’d do anything to help. You know that.”

“Go now,” she said. “Just go. I don’t want you here.”

Robbie stumbled out of the room. He crossed the street and took shelter in the mouth of the alley on the other side. There was a tavern on the corner, and the constant bustle of the place made him almost invisible.

A distant church clock chimed the quarters and the hours. He calculated that he waited nearly an hour and a half before Mary appeared in the doorway of her house. She was hooded and cloaked as before, but he would have known her anywhere. She set off up the street, her wooden pattens clacking on the cobbles. He followed her, holding well back, keeping to patches of shadow and varying his pace. Soon they began to climb towards the dark mass of Clifton Wood.

Mary followed the rising ground towards the Downs in the northwest. They were not far from the tower of Brunel’s unfinished suspension bridge, looming over the Gorge and the river Avon. Before she reached the Downs, however, Mary turned into a terrace of great stone-faced houses set back from the road. Only one of the houses had shuttered windows, and this was the one she approached. Robbie, watching from across the street, saw her dark figure descending into the basement area in front of the house.

He crossed the road. A plate had been screwed to one of the gateposts. It was too dark to decipher the words engraved upon it. He ran his fingertips over the brass, tracing the cold metallic channels of each letter.