Mr Gunn and Dr Bohemia Read online

  In front of her, one man raised a clenched fist, shaking it in Lord Salisbury’s direction. Another onlooker, seeing this, threw a punch at the heckler.

  Within seconds, fighting had erupted all around her. Sophie whirled to find Eleanor, and as she did, an elbow caught her hard across the bridge of her nose.

  Searing pain burst through her skull. Her eyes felt as if they’d been driven back into their sockets. Everything was a blur. Warm wetness coursed down her cheeks and upper lip. Her legs gave way, and she crumpled, dizzy and nauseated. Bodies crushed close, and boots pounded the cobbles inches from her face. Shouts and screams hammered like nails into her ears.

  She felt hands grip her arms as she was lifted and pulled hard to one side. Her head spun; she couldn’t get her feet under her, but whoever was holding her didn’t allow her to fall.

  She was manhandled into a dark place, and half-pushed, half-guided into a sitting position on a hard bench. The dizziness faded gradually, and with it, the urge to vomit. She was able to focus her eyes again, and she wiped her hand across her face and looked at it. Not blood, she saw with relief; her eyes had been streaming hot tears. She touched her nose, gingerly—it was sore, but thankfully, not broken.

  She became fully aware of her surroundings. She was in the back of a police wagon, from the look of it. It was then that she realised there was someone else in the wagon. Sitting on the bench opposite her, red-faced, was Lord Salisbury.

  Gunn paced the basement room that housed the Tribune’s archive, thinking about what he’d discovered. After two minutes, he forced himself to sit down and relax. Then he took the stairs back to his office slowly and deliberately, for fear of raising Mr. Maynard’s suspicions.

  But those thoughts were quashed when he saw Gallagher rushing toward the door, hurriedly donning his hat and coat as he went.

  Gunn and Maynard almost collided in the office doorway. “What’s happening, sir?”

  “Lord Salisbury was mobbed in Leicester Square a little while ago. Run along, quick-like, and find out exactly what happened. One of the juniors is there, but I need an experienced man.”

  “I saw Gallagher running out—”

  “He’s gone to the hospital to get an interview with Salisbury if he can. Now, go. I need statements from the police, shopkeepers, anyone who saw what happened, and I need them quickly so we can get a special edition out in time for the lunchtime crowd.”

  Gunn snatched his hat from the coat stand and hurried out.

  Gunn waved down a steam taxi as he dashed along the street. “Leicester Square, quick as you can,” he said to the driver as he slammed the door shut.

  The driver wasted no time, and Gunn was yanked back into the seat as the little vehicle accelerated sharply.

  Less than five minutes later, Gunn hopped out of the taxi. He looked around but saw no evidence that anything out of the ordinary had happened. That wasn’t unexpected; the crowd would have evaporated within minutes once any kind of spectacle was over.

  A constable on duty paced a slow beat along the pavement. Gunn went up to him and held up his press credentials. “I was told something happened here a little while ago. Were you here?”

  “Yes, sir. Lord Salisbury was here about half an hour ago, up on that platform.” The copper pointed at a wooden structure draped with cloths near the centre of the square. “He was talking about what the government’s going to do about cleaning up the river and such.”

  “How big was the crowd?”

  “Not a very big one, sir, perhaps a hundred people or so.”

  “I was told Lord Salisbury was mobbed.”

  “I wouldn’t say it was a mobbing, exactly, but people in the crowd started shouting about how long were they going to take and how much it would cost and so forth, and then they started getting a bit rowdy, and the next thing we knew they’d started grabbing tomatoes and apples and things and throwing them at His Lordship.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, then it was lucky there was a few of us here, because they tried to get up on the platform, but we were able to hold them back while His Lordship’s hangers-on got him away safe.”

  “Was he hurt?”

  The copper shook his head. “Not at all. I think I saw him catch a tomato in the phizog, and he probably had a bit of a shaking up, I imagine.”

  “What about the people? Did you find the ones who started the trouble?”

  The copper shook his head. “No, sir, we were too busy watching out for His Lordship. By the time we’d packed him off to hospital, most of the crowd had scarpered.”

  Gunn thanked the man and moved on. He’d have to get back to the office without delay if he was to have the piece written in time. He flagged down another taxi and headed back to Fleet Street.

  Sophie stood at the French windows, watching the rain falling on the huge lawn and flowerbeds of Lord Salisbury’s garden. A thrush flew down from one of the trees and landed on the grass, pecked at something there for a moment, then flew off again, holding what looked like a worm in its beak.

  Her nose and cheekbones began to throb again, and her eyes threatened to water. The doctor at hospital had told her that nothing was broken—but she’d already known that. She remembered, in Africa, telling young soldiers their minor wounds couldn’t be as painful as they claimed. Now she knew better.

  She heard the soft click of the door opening and turned to see Lord Salisbury. She checked her posture. She felt uncomfortable, out of place in His Lordship’s house.

  “I’ve just spoken with my driver. He found your friend Mrs. Stack while we were in hospital and took her home. She told him that she didn’t get mixed up in that awful situation and is in perfect health.”

  “Thank you, Your Lordship,” said Sophie. “That is the correct form of address, isn’t it? I don’t believe I’ve met a lord of the realm before.”

  Salisbury smiled. “I don’t stand on ceremony in my own home, Mrs. Gunn. Call me Leo. Is there anyone you’d like me to contact? Your husband, perhaps?”

  Sophie shook her head. “My husband will be working at the moment, and I’m sure I’ll be home before he is. There’s no need to worry him. I’ve nothing worse than a bruise, after all.”

  Salisbury invited Sophie to sit in one of the armchairs by the fire, and he sat in the one opposite. “I shall have my driver take you home. But not until you have a little more colour in your cheeks; you still look rather pale. I’ve asked Cook to make us a nice cup of tea—that should help. Are you sure you’re feeling well?”

  “I’m still a little shaken, despite the sedative they gave me. But I do feel very much better than I did an hour ago. I’ll be perfectly fine, Your . . . Leo.”

  Salisbury nodded, then was silent for a long moment. “May I ask, what does your husband do for a living?”

  “He’s a journalist for the Tribune.” Sophie wondered what newspaper a lord would read. The Times, probably, she thought.

  “Ah, the Tribune. Excellent paper.” Salisbury looked thoughtful for a moment, then he looked straight into Sophie’s eyes. “Gunn—are you telling me your husband is Cornelius Gunn?”

  Sophie nodded, smiling that the man would know her husband’s name.

  “You must tell him from me that these burglaries he’s been reporting on recently have made most fascinating reading. In fact . . . you know, I believe I’d like to tell him myself. Are you and your husband free Friday evening, Mrs. Gunn?”

  The light showers the Weather Office had predicted turned out to be somewhat heavier than expected, and Gunn’s shoes were yet again soaked through by the time he stepped through his front door that evening and furled his inadequate umbrella.

  He was impatient to tell Sophie what he’d found in the archive that morning—but the flat felt empty. “Sophie?” he called out, but there was no response.

  He wasn’t too concerned; he’d left the office and arrived home a little earlier than he usually did. He changed into dry clothes and tended to the fireplace in the parlour, and was soon sitting comfortably in his favourite armchair, reading a book in front of a cheery blaze.

  An hour and a half passed with still no sign of Sophie, and Gunn began to worry that she was deliberately taking her time to make a point after the earlier upset. His stomach churned at the thought. He really didn’t want another argument.

  A knock sounded at the door. He dropped the book he’d been trying to concentrate on, and rushed to answer.

  Opening the front door, he found Sophie in the company of a chauffeur who held an umbrella over her head to keep off the rain. Both her eyes had been blacked, and a deep purple bruise ran from cheekbone to cheekbone. He bristled. Someone had attacked his wife!

  “Here we are,” said Sophie to the chauffeur before Gunn could react. “Thank you.”

  The young man bowed slightly, then scurried back to the large black steam carriage sitting by the curb.

  “My goodness,” said Gunn, “I must have arrived right after the police took you to hospital.”

  “There’s more. Lord Salisbury has invited us to dinner, and I accepted on your behalf.” Gunn’s eyebrows shot up with surprise.

  “He seems interested in the burglaries you’ve been writing about.” Sophie stopped and frowned. “In fact, I have to say that he seemed uncommonly interested, for a few trivial thefts.” She paused again, shook her head ever so slightly, and turned to look at Gunn again, smiling. “Perhaps he just likes the way you write. Now, tell me about your day.”

  Sophie’s story had almost made Gunn forget about his findings in the archive, but now his excitement came back to him. “I found incontrovertible evidence that Gallagher’s bank robberies and the workshop break-ins are related. Every one of the four bank robberies happened on the same night as
one of the workshop jobs. From what I was able to find out, it looks as if they happened within minutes of each other, even though the locations were up to two miles apart.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Gunn shook his head. “I’m not certain, other than that we appear to have two groups of men working together. What I can’t work out is why they’d work that way. It’s bizarre. But there’s more—another connection that neither I nor Gallagher spotted. When I was looking at one of Gallagher’s stories from a few weeks ago, I happened to notice a little article by one of the junior reporters about some noise complaints that the police had received. Apparently someone was flying an airship in the early hours.”

  “They’re not supposed to do that. Are they?”

  Gunn shook his head. “No flights over the city between ten at night and five in the morning. I didn’t pay the story much mind, but then I noticed a similar story in one of the other papers carrying one of the robbery stories, and it set me to thinking. So I went back over the last few weeks, and I found four noise complaints like that, every one of them happening the same night as one of the break-ins.

  “I went to talk to Haynes—he’s the junior reporter who wrote the stories—and he confirmed it. There were no similar complaints on other nights, just those. And the locations of the noise reports are all within about a mile of the targets of the robberies that were happening at the time.”

  “Too much of a coincidence—”

  “—to be a coincidence,” Gunn finished. “One of the police reports Haynes was working from said the airship engines sounded military in nature. That made Haynes curious, so he went to see the constable who’d taken the report.

  “The complainant was a veteran who’d served in Africa, and he’d told the copper that the engines on military transport airships have a distinctive undertone because of the armoured cowls around the propellers, and he’d heard the same undertone that night.”

  “Do you think the military are involved?” asked Sophie.

  Gunn shook his head. “I don’t see how that would make any sense. It’s possible that the man was mistaken, or that someone else has an airship that happens to use propeller cowls like the army transports. I can see no reason behind any of it. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, and I don’t think I have all the pieces yet.”

  The next day, Gunn arrived home from the office and sat, heavily, in his favourite armchair. “I have had a truly awful day,” he said to Sophie.

  “Oh, dear. You must tell me.”

  “It seems that Maynard has had enough of me spending time investigating the workshop break-ins, and I had to give all my notes about them to Gallagher. That’s my work, and I just had to hand it over as if it meant nothing to me.”

  “All your notes?” said Sophie. “Surely you didn’t tell him about the airship?”

  Gunn smiled a little. “No. I hadn’t actually committed that information to the engine, and I hadn’t written anything down about the timings of the break-ins. All I pointed out was the fact that the walls were broken in the same way, and left Gallagher with that.”

  “But if you’re not working on those stories any more, what will you be doing?”

  “I was given a series of petty burglaries in Brentford to report. Which I did.” Gunn grinned. “While I was at it, I noticed that almost every one of them had been executed in the same way, and I recognised the pattern from some burglaries last year. It was light-fingered Freda Parker behind them, I knew it. So while I was at it, I tapped off a note to Jameson to tell him that Parker’s been up to her old tricks. I expect tomorrow I’ll be reporting that she’s been arrested.”

  Sophie smiled, then frowned. “You just can’t stop yourself, can you? What will Maynard do if he finds out you did more than just write up the stories? He won’t fire you, will he?”

  Gunn shrugged. “His complaint was that I was spending more time investigating than I was sitting at a desk tapping out stories. This time, I did both. He has nothing to complain about. He also can’t complain about me spending my own time looking into the workshop break-ins.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The other day I was plotting the locations of all the workshops that had been broken into, and it occurred to me to make a list of what was taken. I was looking for a pattern, and I think I may have found it. All of those workshops were being used by lone inventors, the kind who work in secret, thinking they’re going to make a fortune from some brilliant idea that nobody else has thought of.”

  “Crackpots,” said Sophie.

  Gunn shrugged. “In some cases, certainly, although I think these particular victims may have all had ideas with merit, because every one of them has had good ideas in the past—proven inventions that work. That’s the point, I think. I suspect that someone wanted these inventors’ work because it’s useful to them in some way.”

  “And the fact that their earlier work is known makes them targets, now.”

  “Precisely. I think our perpetrators have been watching these people because of their histories. It’s a bit vague, I know, but I think I may be able to make use of it.”

  “You’re going to try to work out who’s next, aren’t you?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. And I’m planning on being there when the next break-in happens.”

  Lord Salisbury’s steam carriage arrived at the flat at five-thirty precisely. Connie, wearing a new dark suit and top hat, almost stumbled when he caught sight of Sophie in her evening gown of deep flame orange—he’d said it matched her green eyes and copper hair perfectly—and she smiled at him. That was the reaction she’d hoped for.

  Gunn took Sophie’s elbow and guided her to the carriage. She’d used some powder to try to cover the bruise on her face, but she still felt a little self-conscious.

  It was a half-hour drive to Lord Salisbury’s townhouse, a large, four-storey affair. Connie took her arm and escorted her, passing beneath the Salisbury coat of arms above the arch around the front door. The door opened ahead of them as they went up the short flight of stone steps. A servant took Connie’s hat and coat and Sophie’s shawl, and showed them to the drawing room.

  The room was large, filled with warm light from the wide fireplace and from gas lamps on the walls, which were decorated with fabrics of deep green and gold.

  Lord Salisbury stood by the fire, talking in hushed tones with a tall, distinguished woman. She had a strong jaw and hair the same colour as His Lordship’s; the word ‘Rubenesque’ flitted across Sophie’s mind. She knew instinctively that this was Lady Salisbury.

  “Gunn.” Lord Salisbury, smiling broadly, stepped forward to shake Connie’s hand. “Delighted to meet you at last.” He turned to Sophie. “Mrs. Gunn. I’m glad to see you looking well. I trust you’ve quite recovered?”

  “Yes, Your Lordship, thank you. Please, call me Sophie.”

  Lord Salisbury insisted that they both call him Leo, and introduced his wife, Sandy. He asked, “Would anyone care for an aperitif?”

  Connie answered, “Yes, we’d love one, thank you. Please, call me—”

  “Connie,” said Sophie. “His friends just call him Gunn, but I don’t think that’s very friendly.”

  While the drinks were being poured, Sophie noticed an anomaly in the pattern in the wall covering near the curtains, and realised she was looking at tubing that had been painted, not quite perfectly, to match the fabric behind.

  Lord Salisbury noticed her interest. “Is something wrong, my dear?”

  “I’m sorry, Your—Leo. I couldn’t help noticing those tubes by the curtains. Do you have an engine in the house? Your very own engine?”

  “My goodness, you do have sharp eyes. Yes. I use it for correspondence and in my work, generally, and also for calculating household finances and things of that nature. It also controls the radiators and ventilators to make sure that occupied rooms are maintained at the perfect temperature. It’s saved us a small fortune in fuel costs, I can tell you. The day will come when every house in Britain has something similar. Save the country millions.”

  Connie spoke up, “I read recently that Babbage himself said the days of the mechanical engines are almost at an end.”

  “Quite true. All those cogs and gears are something of a limitation. Charles—Babbage, that is—was explaining it to me a few weeks ago. We really need to be able to make the things portable, and that means making them much smaller, and resistant to vibration and contamination by dust and dirt. Movable engines could be put aboard airships, boats, sea-skimmers, what have you. The safety record of the underground trains and the trams is first-class. Imagine being able to say the same of airships and cargo boats.”