Mr Gunn and Dr Bohemia Read online

  Dr. Gunn and Mr. Bohemia copyright © 2013 by Pete Ford

  Published by Xchyler Publishing

  an imprint of Hamilton Springs Press, LLC

  ISBN (eBook Version): 1940810019

  ISBN-13 (eBook Version): 978-1-940810-01-0

  eBook License Notes:

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  Penny Freeman, Editor-in-chief

  www.xchylerpublishing.com

  1st Edition: October, 2013

  Cover and Interior Design by D. Robert Pease, walkingstickbooks.com

  Edited by Terri Wagner and Jessica Shen

  Published in the United States of America

  Xchyler Publishing

  For Kate.

  Bright blue-white lightning flickered against the sheets of rain as Cornelius Gunn glimpsed upward briefly, squinting against the fat raindrops at the low, heavy clouds. A moment later came the crash and crackle of thunder, drowning the droning hum of airship propellers.

  Gunn pulled the collar of his raincoat up and the brim of his hat down, and increased his pace along the rain-slick cobbles between the brick walls of the tall industrial buildings running the length of the street. Factory workers and clerks hurried along around him, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched against the rain as they headed toward their places of work in that part of Battersea.

  A steam carriage passed him on the cobblestone road, going his way, and its wheels splashed ice-cold water over his already-soaked shoes and ankles. Gunn cursed and shook his fist pointlessly at the driver of the carriage as it melted into the gloom.

  Thunderstorms were unusual at that early hour of the morning, and particularly at that time of the year. Unusual, thought Gunn, but not unheard of, and more frequent these days. According to the Royal Society and their huge calculating engines, it had something to do with the increasing smoke and soot from the burning of coal in the capital.

  Babbage, the man who’d invented those engines, had himself examined and validated the sequences created by the statisticians, and had overseen the transcription of the old paper weather records into the form required by the engines.

  Lord Salisbury—an advocate of the country’s incredible progress in the scientific and technical arts—had voiced his concern in the House. He worried about the weather, the filthy condition of the River Thames, and the damage to trees by sulphurous poisons carried in the rain. He claimed those could ultimately cause the public to lose faith in the new industrial revolution and the scientific authorities behind it. He had requested a Royal Commission to find solutions while the situation was still manageable.

  The engines that the Royal Society’s scientists used fascinated Gunn, though he’d never seen the machines at work. He’d asked Maynard, his editor, to assign him to the story so he could see one for himself, but Maynard had refused and given it to Gallagher, instead. Gallagher got most of the interesting assignments, leaving Gunn to report on petty burglaries and industrial accidents. It left a sour taste in his mouth.

  He sighed. The story he was following that day was one of the few that held any promise of interest.

  A gust of wind blew cold rain against the back of Gunn’s neck, and he pulled his collar yet higher. Just ahead, a pair of police constables stood by a couple of portable bollards supporting a heavy rope, blocking an alleyway between two buildings. Passersby gave them curious glances as they hurried along, seeking shelter from the appalling weather.

  One of the constables held a hand up to Gunn as he approached. “You can’t come through here, sir. I’m afraid you’ll have to go ’round the long way.”

  “What happened here?”

  The policemen looked at each other. The other answered, “Industrial vandalism. You can’t go down there—the wall’s been broken through, and it could collapse at any minute. It’s not safe.”

  Gunn took off a glove, and, after struggling with the buttons of his raincoat, pulled his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and flipped it open to show the constable his press card. “Cornelius Gunn with the Tribune. Is Inspector Jameson here?”

  Gunn knew his friend Jameson didn’t work small-time break-ins.

  “Haven’t seen him, sir,” said the first.

  “Were one of you here when it happened?”

  “It’s my beat, sir, but I wasn’t here at the time. I heard a noise and I went along the alley for a look, but whoever did it had already gone.”

  Gunn slipped his wallet back inside his jacket and made a mental note of the number, 247, in silver figures on the collar of the policeman’s uniform. If the incident followed the pattern, then it was the sixth such crime perpetrated in the last few weeks. Gunn had begun to suspect that some beat coppers might have been paid to avoid particular locations during their nightly rounds. In an attempt to find commonalities, he was making a list of possibilities, but so far he’d found nothing to support his suspicions.

  Gunn continued, “Does this look like the others?”

  “I couldn’t say, I’m afraid. I didn’t see any of the others.”

  Gunn straightened his shoulders and stepped forward, and the other copper moved to unhook the rope from one of the bollards so that he could pass. Gunn suppressed a smile as he walked into the alley, and the copper replaced the rope behind him.

  “Take care, sir,” the second copper called after him, “that lot down there could come down around your ears.”

  The high walls of the alleyway afforded a little shelter from the rain, and Gunn could just make out, fifty yards away, the far end the alley similarly roped off and guarded by two more constables.

  Rain ran down the wall of deep red bricks and collected into rivulets that streamed from the top of the jagged hole, eight feet high and six wide. Gunn stepped carefully over the mound of rubble and into the workshop beyond, removing his hat once out of the rain.

  The workshop was dark. Gunn found an oil lamp and a box of safety matches on a shelf; a few moments later, he held up the light to examine the room. The floor was a wet mix of cement dust, bits of mortar, and rainwater, and covered with footprints. A heavy workbench that had at one time been set against the outside wall now lay on its back six feet into the room, the wood splintered, shards of glass and metal filings strewn around it.

  Tools cluttered another bench near the middle of the room, along with bits of wire, and pieces of crystal in various shapes and colours. Gunn noticed a patch of wood that was clear of the brick and mortar powder that dusted every other surface.

  He went back to the hole in the wall and stooped to look closely at the mound of bricks. There were more inside the room than had fallen into the alleyway—the wall had been smashed in from the outside. He picked one up and held it close to the lamp, turning it this way and that in his gloved hand.

  He examined half a dozen of the fallen bricks before stepping back out into the alley and holding the lamp up to the wall around the breach, puzzled. Explosives would have blown rubble across the room, and pickaxes and hammers would have marked the bricks, but Gunn found evidence of neither—just as it had been with the other break-ins. br />
  Gunn went back into the workshop and performed one last examination of the room. As he lowered the lamp, he noticed something on the floor, and crouched to get a closer look. Two shallow, parallel grooves, a foot long and about four inches apart, were gouged into the stone, as if someone had dragged some titanically heavy piece of equipment across the surface. The gashes had rough edges, as if they’d been made recently.

  Finally, he stood, straightening his collar, and left the workshop. As he stepped over the fallen bricks, he felt a rumble and shudder above him, and jumped forward into the alleyway just as another portion of the wall collapsed onto the spot where he’d been standing.

  Gunn shivered at the close shave, then left to ask more questions of P.C. 247.

  Gunn flagged down a steam taxi as he walked back the way he came. Climbing inside, he changed his mind about returning to the Tribune’s office right away; instead, referring to a sheaf of notes he kept in an inside pocket, he directed the driver to an address on Kingsfield Street, not too far from his present location. There, he took care of business in short order, then asked the driver to take him to Fleet Street.

  Mr. Maynard, the Tribune’s editor, was not happy when Gunn arrived. “My office, please,” he said as Gunn hung his coat on the stand next to his desk.

  Gunn followed his editor and closed the door behind him. He knew what Maynard was about to say.

  Maynard sat behind his desk, his eyes boring into him. Gunn defied the urge to look away. “Where have you been all morning?”

  “Battersea, sir. I was—”

  “You were, yet again, wasting time treating a petty burglary as if it was the Great Train Robbery.”

  “With respect, sir, I learned things that were not in the report that came in on the wire machine.”

  “But was it something worth reporting, Cornelius? Bearing in mind that this little story won’t get more than three inches in the evening edition?”

  “There’s a bigger story here, sir, I just know it.”

  Maynard sighed, and ran his fingers through his hair. “Cornelius, you’re one of our best—but for the purposes of this newspaper, all I need you to do is report the facts. In the time you’ve been gone, you could have written up half a dozen stories from the wire reports without leaving your desk, just as your colleagues do—a point you ignore deliberately.” Maynard’s eyes went to a sheet of newsprint on his desk, and he waved a dismissive hand at Gunn. “Go back to work, Cornelius, and leave investigating crimes to the police.”

  “Do you still think a gang of men with sledgehammers is responsible for the break-ins?” asked Gunn, taking a sip from his pint of bitter. He looked over at Inspector Jameson’s short, slightly overweight form.

  Gunn had sent a message suggesting a discussion over a liquid lunch at a pub near Scotland Yard. It also gave him an excuse to get away from the office—and Mr. Maynard—for a while.

  Inspector Jameson shifted awkwardly on his barstool and lifted his own glass. “I take it from your tone you don’t agree?”

  “No, I don’t. According to your constable at the scene, there was nobody anywhere near the alley when he walked by ten minutes earlier. By the time he returned, the wall had already been smashed in.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “They knocked an eight-foot hole through two layers of bricks. They had time to do whatever they’d come to do, then pick up their tools and leave without being observed. How many men would it take to knock a wall through in the few minutes they had?”

  “I think six men could do it.”

  “The alleyway is eight feet wide. It was dark, and raining cats and dogs. Could six men swing sledgehammers in those conditions without getting in each other’s way?”

  Jameson said nothing.

  “Moreover, sledgehammers and pickaxes leave distinctive marks on the bricks. I know, because I paid a visit to a demolition site to find out. There were no such marks on the bricks at the workshop.”

  “They didn’t use those kinds of tools, then.”

  No point pressing further, he thought. He had made his point, and knew Jameson would come around when he had time to think about it. “What was taken from the workshop?”

  Jameson took another pull from his pint, and savoured it before answering. “I’m not sure. The owner of the workshop is an inventor—name of Robinson—and his latest contraption was taken. All he would say was that it would have been revolutionary. He wouldn’t give me any details, other than a rough description.”

  Gunn recalled the clear space he’d seen on the workbench. “A box, about a foot across.”

  “I won’t even ask how you found that out. He said I wouldn’t understand what it was or how it worked even if he explained it. He’s probably right.”

  “Did anyone else know about it?”

  “Robinson didn’t think so. He has his rivals—all these inventor johnnies do—but said he’d been extremely careful.”

  Gunn took another sip of his beer and recalled the bits of crystal he’d seen in Robinson’s workshop. “My guess is that it has something to do with light.” Jameson shrugged and Gunn continued, “I’d bet your man Robinson was extremely careful only when in the company of those he considered his equals. He said that you wouldn’t understand. That tells me he doesn’t credit the man in the street with any intelligence.”

  “So you think he may have let slip some details to someone?”

  “Perhaps to tradesmen, the people he bought his tools and materials from, yes.”

  “That’s not much of a lead,” said Jameson, frowning. “Who knows how many other people might have heard whispers starting that way. We could never track them all down.”

  Gunn shook his head. “Indeed. What are you going to do next?”

  Jameson paused. “Gunn, I consider you a friend, but I also have to remember that you’re a scribbler, and I sometimes wonder if information for your stories is the only reason you cultivate my acquaintance. That’s police business, and you know I can’t say anything.”

  Gunn knew, without even looking, that Jameson was smiling.

  “Do me a favour, would you? Leave this one to me and my lads. We’ll get to the bottom of it, and when we do, I promise that you and your rag will be the first to get the details. All right?”

  Gunn looked at Jameson, raising an eyebrow. “Not like you to be offering professional advice, Jameson. Is there something you’d like to tell me?”

  He shook his head a little too quickly. “You know as much as I do. I’m just saying that it’ll probably turn out to be some group of youngsters stealing stuff to sell along with the lead they strip off of church roofs, and not worth your time and trouble. Especially trouble, from what you’ve told me about your boss. Not worth getting yourself sacked over.”

  Gunn spent the rest of his afternoon at his desk at the Tribune office. First, he wrote a handful of short articles about various assaults and burglaries that Jameson had told him about and got them into the Tribune’s engine in time for the evening edition. Then he pored over a map of the city while thinking on an idea he’d had about the workshop attacks. Finally, with little else to do, he spent an hour working on his pet project—the strange disappearance of Doctor Bohemia.

  Doctor Bohemia had been an engineer, inventor, and, as was true of many of that ilk, a showman, demonstrating recent discoveries and inventions in front of paying audiences to finance his work. Bohemia had been particularly successful on the stage.

  Then, in 1853, Bohemia had dropped out of sight. Gunn had become fascinated by the man after chancing across some handbills from late 1851 advertising his performances, and had made it a personal quest to find out why Bohemia had left the stage, and what had become of him. Something in Gunn’s reporter’s instinct insisted there was a story to be told.

  Gunn had found some time to interview the owner of the theatre Bohemia had used for most of his performances, and the man had given him access to his financial records of the period. Bohemia was not
his real name, of course, and Gunn had been able to determine he had been in reality a Doctor Magnus Ballard.

  The records had shown the address of a rented apartment in Brentford, but the doctor had moved away in 1853 and left no forwarding address. Gunn was in the process of using the various London directories in the Tribune’s library to compile a list of addresses for the name ‘Ballard,’ with the intention of further investigating the doctor’s movements.

  On the list, he drew a line through the address on Kingsfield Street he’d visited that morning; the owner was indeed named Ballard, but had no knowledge of any doctor. Gunn had started with a list of eighty addresses, and so far had eliminated about a quarter of those.

  Gunn left the office at four as the evening staff began to wander in, picking up a copy of the early evening edition on his way out. He glanced up. The rain had stopped and the sky had brightened somewhat.

  He looked at the front page of the newspaper, then frowned, his lips compressing into a thin line. Folding the paper and shoving it roughly under his arm, he walked down the street in the direction of his home.

  He arrived at 4:30 p.m. The little flat where he lived with his wife was empty, and he assumed that Sophie was out visiting friends. He settled in the parlour with a book while he waited for her to return.

  Sophie picked up her teacup and took a sip as she looked out of the window of Mrs. Stack’s drawing room. The rain had almost stopped, and the sky, though still cloudy, seemed a little brighter. It didn’t make her feel any brighter, though.

  “And you, dear—” Mrs. Stack’s voice broke into Sophie’s reverie.

  “Hmm?” she said, turning to Mrs. Stack. She realised she’d been daydreaming while the other ladies—Mrs. Stack, Miss Peacock, and Mrs. Benning—had been talking. They looked at her with disapproval.

  “I’m sorry, Eleanor.” She placed the cup carefully back on its saucer. “I’m being quite rude, aren’t I?”

  “You just seem a little out of sorts today, dear. Whatever is the matter?”