Will Thomas: To Kingdom Come

“You! Boy! Come here.”

An older fellow was gesturing to me. He was kneeling by a supine figure, a medical bag at his feet. Unwittingly, I’d stepped into an operating theater. Barker’s last words were still in my ears, and I stepped forward.

“How can I help?” I asked, crouching beside him.

“Get on the other side of this fellow and hold the wound closed, so I can stitch it. Are your hands clean?”

“I think so,” I said, holding them out. The doctor raised an open bottle of brandy from the floor and dashed some of it over my hands. Shaking them, I stepped over the body and got a good look at the victim for the first time. His face was soaked in blood. Between the horse, the patrons, and this patient, I’d seen more blood in the last three minutes than in my entire life.

“It looks bad, sir,” I couldn’t help commenting.

“Oh, he’ll live,” the old surgeon said. “Head wounds always bleed like this. Hold it just there. Pinch the wound closed.”

I did, and the doctor poured another jigger over the open wound. The patient jumped and let out a curse. I’d thought him senseless. Instead, he took a healthy swallow from the brandy bottle before the doctor leaned forward with the needle and thread.

Just then, there was a loud report outside and all cries from the horse ceased. I thought I had recognized the sound of Barker’s American Navy Colt revolver. A minute or two later, after the patient was finished being stitched, I looked up and saw that my employer was standing behind me, the reek of gunpowder still on his clothes.

“Good lad,” he said, after I’d mopped the patient’s bloody face with a rag and lifted his head enough for the physician to bind the wound with gauze. I stopped and wiped the gore from my hands with a towel. A half hour before, I’d been waving my arms in the garden, and now I was assisting at an operation.

“Come, gentlemen,” the doctor admonished. “This is not our only patient.”

Barker and I responded by removing our jackets and rolling up our sleeves. What happened over the next half hour was more of the same: a number of nasty-looking surface injuries but, thankfully, no fatal ones. Just when my energy was flagging, a brace of capable matrons from nearby Charing Cross Hospital bustled in and immediately set to work. We were able to don our coats and steal away. Barker was anxious to see after his own chambers in the next street.

Debris had been blown over the buildings onto the roofs and cobblestones of Craig’s Court. Our offices looked solid as ever, but without benefit of glass, save a few shards. Broken bricks and slates had fallen upon the steps. Barker unlocked the door, though it was obvious that anyone could have vaulted the sill and climbed in.

In our waiting room, glass was strewn across the floor and furniture, and dust coated everything; but nothing appeared damaged. Barker moved on to his chambers quickly. There was more destruction there. A few bricks had come through the window. Fortuitously, I had closed and locked my desk, a maple roll-top that Barker had acquired for my predecessor. There was a large chip out of the top where a brick had struck it. A pedestal lay on its side farther into the room, with shards of what had been an antique Chinese vase, whose worth I couldn’t begin to calculate. Glass was scattered over the Persian rugs here, and a thick layer of dust coated the rows of bookcases that lined the room. Even Barker’s spartanly neat desk had not been spared. The few papers he’d allowed to remain were scattered and the inkwell had been knocked over, its contents dribbling down the side of the desk. Barker set the inkwell upright, then bent down and picked up some of the shards of porcelain from the floor.

“Blast,” he muttered. Barker was a gentleman by decision, if not by birth. It was the most he would allow himself to say about the loss. I assumed the vase had some sentimental meaning to him, aside from its obvious intrinsic worth.

“It is in whole pieces,” I pointed out. “It can be mended. I saw an advertisement in The Times for an agency that promised they could make them look as good as new.”

Barker gently collected the pieces and set them on his desk, then befouled his handkerchief with the ink, wiping down the corner and sides of the desk. He had better luck here; the desk was kept so highly polished with beeswax that the ink could not penetrate to the wood. It had seeped into the floor, however, and those few spatters of ink would forever remind me of this night’s occurrence. Barker stepped by me and pitched the sodden handkerchief out the window into the dustbin.

“Unlock your desk and get out your pad, lad,” he ordered. “Let us make a list.”

I took the key from my waistcoat pocket and unlocked the drawer, removing my stenographic pad and a pencil, while Barker surveyed the room.

“We’ll need to get the glaziers in, first of all, of course,” he said. “I suggest we try someone from Lambeth. All the local tradesmen shall be besieged in the morning. Next, we must send this rug to be cleaned. Your desk shall have to be repaired and refinished. It was a good suggestion about the vase, though we both know it shall never be the same again. Perhaps you can track down that advertisement for me. Of course, we have hours of work ahead of us. Dusting these books will take days in itself. I wouldn’t want to be continually pulling bits of glass out of my fingertips from now on, whenever I needed a reference.”

“Certainly not,” I agreed. “Anything else?”

“I wonder …” he said. I knew the look in his eye, or at least what he was thinking. The next thing he would do was unlock his smoking cabinet and take out one of his meerschaum pipes. It was a smooth finished pipe this time, instead of one of his more elaborately carved ones. The rim of the pipe was blackened, giving way to yellow and finally to purest white on the bowl. Barker pulled out his chair, reached for his handkerchief, and realized he’d thrown it out. He accepted mine, dusted the chair, and was soon seated, smoking his pipe and looking out through the bare window frames at the darkened offices across the street. I knew better than to interrupt him while he was thinking.

After five minutes or so, we heard the crunch of glass out front. Someone was in the waiting room. Barker pulled the pipe from his mouth and looked over. My hand went into the drawer of my desk, where I kept my Webley revolver. The door opened slowly, and a head peered around it, its face dominated by a huge, sandy mustache and side-whiskers.

“Poole!” Barker said. It was Terence Poole, an inspector from Scotland Yard, and one of my employer’s closest friends.

“Hello, Barker. Quite a to-do, isn’t it? I’ve been keeping an eye out. Plenty of thieves and pickpockets about already, looking for spoils. I didn’t want to see your digs picked clean.”

“Sneak thieves, eh?”

“Sneak thieves, pickpockets, the lot. Scotland Yard’s blown up, and the criminal element won’t let the grass grow under its feet. There was a second bomb that went off at the same time in Pall Mall at the Junior Carlton Club, but the damage there is not as bad as at the Yard. The gymnasium is gone, I’m afraid. Changing room as well. Of course, we’ll rebuild. Your classes will have to wait, unless we find another place to meet.”

Barker nodded his head, registering that several parts of his life had been altered by the explosion. We could be back in business in a day or two, but it would be weeks before the Rising Sun was open again, and Scotland Yard would be inconvenienced by masons, plasterers, and painters for months.

“What have you discovered so far?”

“An infernal device went off in a public lavatory inside the Criminal Investigation Department. We found part of a clockwork mechanism. Nothing complicated-parts salvaged from a mantel clock or the like-but effective for all that.”