The Aquila Project Read online

  ‘Those men, Sergeant,’ said Hare, ‘must stay at their work, because the boilers have to be stoked constantly if the bridge mechanism is to work properly – which it must, on this day of all days. They work in both rooms, moving from boiler to boiler as the need arises.’

  ‘They look very experienced, sir.’

  ‘They are. They’re all ex-Royal Navy stokers. Now, when the shift changes, which will be at a quarter to twelve, one of the relieving stokers will be our anarchist. Apparently, it’s known that he’ll try to gain entrance by attaching himself to the relieving men. They’ve already been warned to accept him as one of their number as they walk down the slip road.’

  ‘Somebody, somewhere, sir, knows an awful lot about what’s going to happen.’

  ‘Somebody does, Sergeant Knollys. It makes you think, doesn’t it? Still, ours not to reason why. We’ll do the job, and then fade into the background.’

  Inspector Hare turned briefly to look at the sweating stokers, who seemed oblivious of the police presence. Their efforts were concentrated solely on keeping the fire-boxes supplied with coal. They had closed the furnace doors for a while, and were resting on their spades.

  ‘You men,’ said Hare, ‘mustn’t make any attempt to assist the police if this anarchist turns violent. When your relief party arrives, this dangerous man will be part of it. You must leave him to us. Climb up into the accumulator shaft, and stay on the platform there, until I give the all clear.’

  The men nodded their understanding, threw open the doors of the fire-boxes once more, and replenished the glowing fires with vast quantities of fine furnace coal.

  Mr Hare pulled a large turnip watch out of a pocket in his naval jacket.

  ‘It’s just gone half past ten, Officers,’ he said. ‘You’d better make yourselves as comfortable as you can on those benches against the wall. It’s going to be over an hour’s wait. Sergeant Knollys, the Home Office man wants to see you. He’s in a little tiled storeroom at the rear of Number 1 Boiler Room. He says he knows you.’

  Knollys left the seven police officers to wait in nervous anticipation for the arrival of the destroyer, and went back into the first of the chambers. The boilers hissed and rumbled. The fingers on the gauges flickered behind their glass covers. Water ran fiercely through mysterious pipes.

  The clean, modern room seemed tinder-dry, magnifying tenfold the heat of the June day. Knollys imagined the black smoke rising vertically from the tall chimney sited between the two boiler rooms.

  In a small tiled room behind the boilers Jack Knollys found a morose, elderly man with a long drooping moustache. He was sitting on a metal tool box, reading a backless book which looked as though it was regularly gnawed by mice. Beside him, on the toolbox reposed a black bowler hat and a claw-hammer. Despite the overwhelming heat, the man wore a thick black serge suit, and had wound a green muffler round his neck.

  ‘Hello, Mr Mack,’ said Knollys, ‘I thought it might be you.’

  ‘It’s nice to see you again, Mr Knollys,’ said Mr Mack. ‘I was hoping that you’d give me a hand here, if the worst comes to the worst, and this madman actually turns up. It sounds very peculiar to me. Some crazed individual with a grudge wants to rush in here with a little time-bomb, hoping it will blow Tower Bridge to pieces. Most unlikely, you know. It may have naval stokers, but it isn’t a ship. And it won’t sink. Still, the Home Secretary thought it was a matter for Home Office Explosions, which is why I’m here. Colonel Majendie’s in Cardiff this week, so it had to be me. I demurred, of course, but there’s no arguing with Mr Asquith. So we’ll all contain ourselves in patience until a quarter to twelve.’

  It was at just twenty minutes to the hour that Sergeant Knollys, who had stationed himself behind the outer door of No 1 Boiler Room, heard the clatter of boots on the slip road which heralded the arrival of the relief stokers. He alerted Inspector Hare with an urgent whisper, and then rejoined Mr Mack in the tiled storeroom. The retiring stokers moved swiftly to the iron staircase rising up to the accumulator platform, and in seconds they had disappeared from sight. The police officers drew their truncheons and stood silently in the shelter of the inner wall.

  At a quarter to twelve the door was opened, and four men came into the room. Three of them passed through the arch into the second boiler room, apparently intent on their work. Knollys saw the fourth man, who was dressed like the others in the uniform of a naval stoker, dart across the floor to the rear of the first boiler, and wedge a canvas-covered parcel underneath two of its supporting struts.

  The man had taken no more than a couple of steps backwards when Jack Knollys, with a mighty bellow of rage, hurled himself on to the would-be destroyer and brought him crashing to the floor. At the same time, the posse of Bermondsey police rushed through the arch, truncheons drawn. In a moment, they had hauled the man to his feet.

  Mr Mack had left his shelter in the storeroom, dragged the parcel from its hiding place, and unwrapped it from its concealing cloth. Knollys saw him raise his hammer, and smash a small glass dial let into the front of the device. Knollys had seen the old explosives expert perform that crude but effective remedy for timing-clocks before. For the moment at least, they were all safe.

  Outside, beneath the blazing June sky, the Prince of Wales’s carriage passed on to the bridge. There came a sustained bout of cheering, and the band of the Coldstream Guards struck up ‘God save the Queen’.

  Beneath the southern approach road, in the hidden boiler room, Inspector Hare confronted the man who had tried unsuccessfully to plant a lethal device beneath the first boiler. He saw a man of about thirty, with a long, narrow face, good features, dark hair, and cold blue eyes. His arms had been pinioned by two of the constables. His head hung down upon his chest in what looked like total despair.

  Knollys, who had rejoined Mr Mack, turned round to look at the man, who raised his head and caught his glance, and there was something in the bomber’s expression that intrigued Knollys. He had expected anger, or even wild hatred. But this man regarded him with what seemed like reproach. Reproach?

  ‘You are Anders Grunwalski,’ said Inspector Hare, ‘and I arrest you—’

  Grunwalski suddenly sprang back to life. With a shrill cry of rage he wrenched himself free from his captors, seized one of the constables’ truncheons, and used it as a deadly flail to cut a way of escape towards the exit. To the accompaniment of shouts and curses from the dazed and bleeding officers, who had fallen to the floor, he threw the door open and dashed into the slip road.

  Oh, no, my beauty, thought Jack Knollys, you’re not going to escape so lightly. He leapt over the injured men and darted out in pursuit. There he was, sprinting with an athlete’s effortless speed up the approach road. What was that sudden burst of cheering? The Royal carriage must have passed on to the bridge. All eyes would be on them: no one would take any notice of one single running man….

  What’s he doing now? He’s pulled a pistol from his pocket! If I don’t catch up with him, thought Knollys, someone will be killed. He could hear the harsh panting of his own breath, and the faltering steps of the injured constables behind him. He summoned up sufficient breath to shout: ‘Stop that man!’ but at the same moment there came a wild and uninhibited chorus of steam whistles and church bells rising from the river and the riverside districts on both banks. Nobody would hear him above that din.

  Pursuit of the fleet-footed assassin was useless. Knollys knew that he was built too heavily to catch Grunwalski before he gained the entrance to the bridge. Perhaps he had designs on one of the notables sitting in the pavilion at the north end? Had the business in the boiler room been a mere diversion?

  It was then that Knollys saw a small detachment of soldiers assembled at the top of the slip road. He remembered Superintendent Mackharness’s great map of the day’s dispositions, and recalled that these men were a detachment of the 3rd Middlesex Volunteers. As Grunwalski neared the group of men, one of them saw the running terrorist and his deadly weapon. As
swift as thought, the artilleryman drew his cutlass, and felled Grunwalski with a single blow from the flat of its blade. In seconds Sergeant Knollys was upon him. A moment later, the unconscious man was secured, manacled and fettered.

  No one on the bridge, mused Knollys drily, and no excited spectator in the festive stands surrounding it, could have been aware of the deadly drama that had just taken place.

  Arnold Box, still. at his post on the roof of Carmody’s Wool Depot, watched as Anders Grunwalski was carried unconscious down the slip road and into the boiler room. The frantic cheering of the crowds of spectators continued as the Royal procession reappeared at the end of Tooley Street on its way back over the bridge. The river rang with the hooting of steam whistles, and the deeper vibrant tones of the liners lying at anchor further downstream. No one had noticed the attempt to blow up Tower Bridge on its inaugural day.

  Box trained his binoculars on to the Royal procession. He’d no idea who some of those people were – upper-crust folk crammed into carriages, and dripping with medals and diamonds. Ah! Here were the Prince and Princess of Wales. She looked lovely, as always, smiling and gracious. She’s wearing a silk dress – blue, it is, with silver threads in it. He’d tell Mrs Peach about that. He looked magnificent, as you might expect. Kitted out as a Field Marshal, by the look of it.

  The incident at the bridge had disturbed Box. How had the man come to escape from a posse of seven police officers? It had taken a single young soldier to subdue him. Before that had happened, Grunwalski had produced a pistol. Why had they not searched him? The authorities should have let City handle it.

  What would Inspector Hare do now? If he stuck to the plan pinned up in Room 6 at the Rents, he’d take his prisoner and the whole posse in a Black Maria to Weavers’ Lane Police Station in Bermondsey, where he’d lock Grunwalski up for the night. The whole business looked like the pathetic attempt of one disgruntled man to make his mark on history. Well, he’d failed.

  It had been a heady morning for Superintendent Mackharness. Freed from the thrall of his dark office in King James’s Rents, he had arrived at the long pavilion running up from Tower Hill to the northern end of the new bridge at half past ten. He was accompanied by his old friend from Crimea days, Lord Maurice Vale Rose, who had secured him a ticket. It would be an hour before the Royal personages arrived, but there was plenty to see. Aldermen and sheriffs, mayors wearing their gold chains of office, exotic foreigners in peculiar clothing – all these, and more, arrived in a steady stream.

  Box would be stationed on the roof of Carmody’s Wool Depot by now. If there was anything untoward to see, then Box would see it. Sergeant Knollys would be under the southern approach road, adding his very considerable weight to the posse of police provided for the day by Denis Neylan. Surely nothing could go amiss? This Grunwalski was almost certainly acting alone. And in any case, what possible effect could a single bomb in the boiler room have upon the massive triumph of engineering rising giddily above them to the sky? The man was a lunatic….

  The next hour passed swiftly, and the assembled audience amused themselves by watching notables as they arrived, importantly late, in order to create a stir. Here was Mr Asquith, the Home Secretary. There was the Bishop of London.

  At last the Royal Procession arrived. (Had they seized Grunwalski yet? Was the bridge safe?) The carriages crossed the bridge, and passed out of sight. It seemed an age before they returned, the train of vehicles halting at the dais prepared for the Prince and his suite. At last, the formal opening of the new bridge was about to begin.

  The Prince of Wales took up a position in front of the mechanism that would operate the bridge machinery. It had been fancifully disguised as a loving-cup standing on an ornate pedestal. The Recorder of London began to read an interminable and inaudible speech, its words carried away on the breeze, and drowned very effectively by the continual cheering of the crowds. The Prince of Wales read an equally inaudible reply, and then slowly turned the valve that would operate the hydraulic mechanism.

  Immediately the two massive leaves of the carriageway, each 115 feet in length, began to move upwards. There came a blast of trumpets, a wild crescendo of steam whistles from the boats thronging the river, and, behind all the popular clamour, the booming of guns from the Tower of London.

  Mackharness, and the others occupying the seats in the pavilion fell silent as the divided roadway rose majestically and noiselessly into the air until each section blocked the archway of its respective tower. A thunder of cheering rose into the summer sky, and almost immediately a triumphant procession of flag-draped vessels began to pass under Tower Bridge.

  There was an hour to spare before Box was due back at King James’s Rents for a prearranged meeting with Sergeant Knollys, ample time for him to take a cab and visit his old father at his premises in Oxford Street. Toby Box had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1840, at the age of twenty-one, and had risen to the rank of sergeant. He’d always been a uniformed man, a divisional man, not a detective, like his son.

  In 1875, Toby Box had been shot in the leg by a villain called Joseph Edward Spargo, a man who was later hanged for murder. There had followed eighteen years of suffering and the threat of total immobility, and towards the end of ’92 the possibility of gangrene had been mooted. Toby Box’s leg had been amputated at the Royal Free Hospital in Grey’s Inn Road early in January 1893.

  And now, after eighteen months’ convalescence, old Mr Box had come home to Oxford Street. He had learnt to walk with his new leg, and was determined to assume his normal life as proprietor of Box’s Cigar Divan and Hair-Cutting Rooms, a tall and narrow shop a few yards further on from the Eagle public house, just before you came to the turn into New Bond Street.

  As Box came into Oxford Street, he saw the Viking’s landau, with the beribboned black horse between the shafts, draw away from the pavement and join the stream of traffic moving slowly up the busy thoroughfare. He stopped underneath the awnings of Marshall and Snelgrove’s, which stretched low over the hot flags.

  What had the Viking been doing in that particular stretch of Oxford Street? His behaviour at the bridge had been odd, to say the least. It would do no harm to make a few enquiries about him. He was obviously a gentleman of sorts; maybe Superintendent Mackharness would recognize his description. Had he stopped at that particular spot, just by the Eagle, in order to get his hair cut at Pa’s salon? He’d ask Sam, if he remembered.

  The street was crowded with tall, rumbling omnibuses, lorries and vans, and a procession of hansom cabs crawling head to tail towards Oxford Circus. Box darted nimbly through the traffic, and made his way to Box’s Cigar Divan and Hair-Cutting Rooms.

  It was pleasantly cool and shady in his father’s shop, which was perfumed with the many subtle aromas of exposed tobacco. A middle-aged, balding man wearing an alpaca jacket lifted the counter-flap and came forward to greet him.

  ‘Inspector Box, sir,’ said the man, ‘I’m glad you could come this afternoon. All the building work was finished by Thursday night, and Mr Box took up his new quarters yesterday morning.’

  ‘And how is he, Sam?’ asked Box. ‘Is he coping with the leg?’

  ‘He’s fine, Inspector. I think he’s more mobile than he’s been for years, and he’ll want to do his bit around the shop, I expect. But he’ll not be able to cope with stairs anymore.’

  Arnold Box glanced at the narrow staircase that led up to the cigar divan. It had also given access to Toby Box’s snug quarters on the first floor, a tiny sitting-room with a bedroom beyond, looking out on to a tangle of yards. Pa wouldn’t ever go up those stairs again, unless he was carried up in a chair.

  Sam opened a door in a dim recess beyond the counter, and motioned Box to enter a long, newly decorated room, which had been furnished in the heavy, ornate style of earlier in the century. There was a narrow window at the far end, and a gas bracket on either side of a tall mirror above the fireplace.

  ‘Inspector Box to see you, Mr Box,’ said Sam. He c
losed the door after Arnold Box, and returned to the shop.

  A stout, elderly man in his seventies was sitting in a chair near the fireplace. His bald head was framed by a halo of scanty white hair. As Box entered the room, the old man rose stiffly from his chair to greet him.

  ‘How are you, Pa?’ asked Box. ‘Have you settled in, yet?’

  ‘I have, boy,’ said Toby Box. ‘They’ve done a marvellous job down here, and it suits me fine. It’ll be like a new start for me after all those years marooned upstairs. They brought all my furniture down here, as you can see, and converted my upstairs place into a kind of guest apartment. Very handy, if someone wanted to stay.’

  ‘And is the extension finished? They said it would be done by last Monday.’

  ‘It’s all finished now, Arnold. Through that door beside the window there’s a snug bedroom and a little washing-place beyond that, built on part of the back yard.’

  ‘It’s very nice, Pa,’ said Box. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get here to see it all earlier. It’s been hectic this last two weeks at the Rents.’

  Arnold Box looked at his old father, who had resumed his seat. He was wearing a new black suit, with trousers reaching down to his ankles. For years he had worn old-fashioned knee breeches, because of the thick bandages that he’d had to wear on his infected leg. He may be old, thought Box, in fact, seventy-five this year, but his eyes are as keen and bright as they’d been in the days when he’d worked with some of the legendary detectives of Great Scotland Yard, people like Mr Thornton and Mr Aggs.