Ring of Terror (24 page)

Terry & Co., newsagents, with a side-line in invitation cards and a printing press which looked as though it had been new at the time of the Battle of Waterloo and had seen hard service since. Cross them off and out into the street again.

From time to time, his duty had taken him into prisons. It was the women’s prisons that he had found particularly unpleasant. The idea of consigning Anna to the care of those grey-haired, masculine wardresses, who seemed to derive some inner satisfaction from breaking down the girls in their charge, filled him with almost uncontrollable disgust.

A. B. Storrs took photographs, specialising in wedding groups. They had never taken up printing. Too complicated. Cross them off and out into the street once more.

It was darker than it should have been at that time of day in mid-March. The sky overhead was a steely blue, but a thick fringe of cloud had crept up along the eastern edge. The descending sun had spread an unnatural yellow glare across the sky and there was a feeling of undischarged electricity in the air. Storm before long, he thought. A heavy one. Might lift the uncomfortable depression which hung over everything.

The last name on his list was a man who, it turned out, had no shop, only a stall in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral. He specialised in religious cards which pious ladies would slip into their prayer books. He had no printing press. He drew them by hand. Luke spent no more than two minutes on him before he crossed his name off and, with a feeling of relief at a stupid job done, set off down Ludgate Hill.

When he was halfway down all the clocks in the neighbourhood started to announce the hour of six. A cab clattered past him, but he had no eyes for it.

‘I have heard the news,’ said Churchill, ‘and I surmise from the look of grim determination on your face, Sir Melville, that you may have come to present me with an ultimatum.’

‘Not an ultimatum, Minister,’ said Macnaghten, ‘a decision.’

‘Yes?’

‘My resignation as Assistant Commissioner.’

‘I refuse to accept it,’ said Churchill. ‘At least until after you have listened to what my visitor has got to tell us. He had only just started on his exposition when you arrived. Allow me – in case you have not met – Sir Vivian Majendie. Sir Melville. I’m sure you know him.’

Macnaghten nodded.

‘And you, Inspector.’

‘By name, of course,’ said Wensley politely.

Sir Vivian Dering Majendie, who had seen service in the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny, preserved, in his mid-seventies, a look of the gunner officer he had once been, but with an academic overlay derived from the countless dissertations which he had been called on to deliver in his office as Government Inspector of Ammunition and Explosives.

He said, ‘I shall have to start by dealing with the operation of soap-making – or perhaps you are already familiar with the subject?’

Three heads were shaken.

Winston said, ‘We were taught a lot of useless things at Harrow. Nothing about such a practical matter as the making of soap.’

‘Nor at Eton,’ said Macnaghten, equally regretfully.

‘Nor at Monkton Heathfield Village School,’ said Wensley with a grin. It pleased him to be able to swap schools with an Etonian and a Harrovian.

‘You may therefore proceed, Sir Vivian, on the basis that you have an entirely ignorant audience.’

‘Then let us begin at the beginning. Soap can be made from around twenty different raw materials, of which I need only trouble you with two general types. On the one hand there are various vegetable oils, palm oil, olive oil and coconut oil. On the other hand you have animal fats. In both cases the material is boiled or, as the professionals say, saponified. This is carried out in a large soap kettle, such as is clearly shown just inside the right-hand hut. Beside it there is a smaller kettle, which I will come to in a moment. Vigorous boiling and the addition of salt, separates the soap from the spent lyes which are run away through a cock in the base of the kettle and which were, formerly, disposed of as useless.’

‘Which would account,’ said Churchill, ‘for the buckets mentioned in the report.’

‘The buckets which were observed in the report – an excellent report by the way – have nothing to do with the disposal of the lyes. They would simply have been run off and dumped. I say, “would have been”. Not now. As the result of recent developments, those spent lyes have become potentially more valuable than the soap itself. To understand this you must cast your minds back to what I said about the different raw materials. Different in their treatment and different in their end product. Vegetable oils produce the normal, easily useable and easily saleable soap. Animal fats, used by themselves, produce a soap which is hard, difficult to dissolve and of little sale value.’

He looked at the Home Secretary, as though daring him to interrupt, but Winston, genuinely interested as always in the technique of others, refrained.

‘In both cases, when one is proceeding to what I might call part two of the process, the lyes need washing. The lyes of animal fat need less washing than those of vegetable origin. In either case, it is a cumbersome process and one can understand why a primitive outfit such as we have here might wish to simplify it. In a modern factory, the lyes are made to circulate through labyrinths of lead in such a manner that they pass alternately over and under the partitions. This causes them to deposit any globules of oil which they may hold in suspension. A simpler, though less totally effective, method is to dilute the crude product with water and remove the impurities by distillation. In either case the impurities are collected from time to time and carried away in gutta-percha buckets. Are you with me so far?’

‘So far,’ said Churchill, apparently unabashed by having had his knuckles rapped, ‘I have grasped that normal and saleable soap can be produced from vegetable oil – actually, in this case, coconut oil, I understand.’

Macnaghten nodded.

‘The only drawback is that it requires an elaborate washing process which may perhaps be avoided, or be less elaborate in the case of soap produced from animal fat. The point I find difficult to understand is why, in what you might call the animal fat operation, if the end product is unsaleable, anyone should bother to produce it at all.’

‘Precisely,’ said Sir Vivian, with the pleasure of a man who has led his audience to a carefully contrived climax. ‘In this alternative operation, which would be carried out in the smaller kettle – fed by the animal fat so secretively introduced – the soap itself would indeed be almost useless; but the spent lyes would contain as much as three or four times the amount of the secondary product of such operations.’

‘The secondary product?’

‘Which is, of course, glycerine.’

The three members of the audience looked at each other, with a perception of what was to come.

‘Glycerine,’ said Sir Vivian, adding in case his class might be getting out of hand, ‘or trihydroxyl propane, has, of course, a wide number of uses in commerce and in medicine. None of these need concern us. Because the presence outside the huts of those two oddly shaped tanks makes the objective in the present case abundantly clear. The one on the right is a separator. The one on the left, connected with it as you will see by a carefully lagged pipe, is a nitrator. Their end product is nitroglycerine.’

This, although it had been expected, produced an effect almost of shock.

Sir Vivian continued, speaking in his level, lecturer’s voice, ‘The nitroglycerine, a heavy, oily liquid, would first be stored in lead tanks, probably at the back of the left-hand shed. It is exceedingly volatile and astonishingly destructive. Particularly during the process of manufacture. That is why, as you can see from the sketches on the report, both the nitrator and separator have large tanks full of water connected to them below. So that should their contents get out of hand, they can at once be ‘drowned’. When I remind you that Alfred Nobel, the first commercial producer of nitroglycerine, not only blew up his own laboratory, killing his youngest brother and four other men, but was responsible for the accidental sinking of one steamer at Bremerhaven and another at Panama and, finally, for the total destruction of the Krummel factory at Hamburg, then you may perhaps have some notion of its danger and its power.’

Churchill said, ‘One wonders why the production of such lethal stuff was allowed to continue.’

‘No one wondered this more anxiously than Alfred Nobel. And that was why he was deeply relieved when by chance it is said he stumbled on a simple but effective answer. This was to impregnate the nitroglycerine into kieselguhr, a pinkish earth which is found, among other places, in Scotland. The earth, when sifted and impregnated with nitroglycerine, produced the final product which made Nobel a millionaire many times over and may be said, without exaggeration, to have changed the shape of the world: dynamite.’

In the silence which followed the word seemed to reverberate. It was an old demon, suddenly reappearing through the trap door. Since the Fenian outrages, nearly thirty years before, the Explosive Substances Act, rigorously enforced, had reduced the threat of the dynamiters to a bad, but distant memory.

Finally Churchill said, ‘You are telling us that what was assumed to be a soap factory has become – in part at least – a dynamite factory. It is an alarming idea. How much of this explosive might they have in stock?’

‘That would depend on how long this new fat-based process has been proceeding alongside the regular work of the factory.’

Wensley, speaking for the first time, said, ‘Three months at the outside, I’d guess.’

‘Then there are two facts to bear in mind. The advantage of the new process is that it produces glycerine in large quantities. And, once it has been nitrated, the end product is so dangerous that for safety’s sake they would treat it with kieselguhr at once. Which means that they could already have a generous supply.’

Churchill, after thinking about this for a moment, turned to Macnaghten and said, ‘Then we may take it, Sir Melville, that the ineffective explosion at Bethnal Green was designed by the terrorists to suggest that they were running out of explosives.’

‘I think that must be so, Minister.’

‘Whereas, in fact, they may have enough for a regular campaign of destruction. Very well. Until you can assure me that this threat has been abated, I am prepared to sanction the use of firearms, but only by your specially trained men.’

‘Understood.’ Macnaghten tried not to make the pleasure in his voice too apparent.

Churchill rose to indicate that the meeting was at an end. His audience waited, anticipating one of the dicta for which he was already becoming famous.

He did not disappoint them.

‘As a soldier,’ he said, ‘my advice is that when your men shoot, they shoot fast and straight. As a politician, my hope is that they will not have to shoot at all.’

Joe’s day had been as tiring as Luke’s, but a lot more satisfactory.

Although he preferred doing things to thinking about them, given a definite problem he was not incapable of working it through.

‘The way I see it,’ Wensley had said, ‘largely through your efforts – which I’ll make it my job to see get reported in the proper quarter – we’ve succeeded in blocking one of their methods of getting their men inconspicuously to their point of departure in the docks. And a very good method it was.’ He passed his hand thoughtfully over his moustache. ‘We don’t know exactly where that dinghy put them ashore, but whether it was Gallions Steps, Woolwich Pier or Orchard Wharf, they’d have no more than a few hundred yards to go, which was well for them, as that part of London’s not friendly to them. Now that this route is barred, how are the next lot going? They’re a cautious crowd. They’ll have some plan ready. Your job is to find out what it is.’

This might have seemed a task so large and so vague as to be almost impossible, but Joe had certain advantages. In the last few weeks he had examined the landing points mentioned by Wensley and had come to know the area around them. Being a person who made friends wherever he went, he already had a posse of helpers and informants among the sailors, dockers, chandlers, iron-founders, rope-makers, publicans and general hangers-on who lived and worked in Canning Town and East Ham. Moreover, the temperature was rising. Strangers and foreigners, if not actually assaulted, were carefully noted. Joe’s plan was to work inwards from the Victoria Docks, asking questions as he went.

He concentrated on the outlying portions, arguing that the Russians would not risk lodging among the maritime population, but would select a departure point in the more neutral commercial fringe to the north and east. It was after eight hours of walking and talking which had left him hoarse and footsore, that he picked up his first promising lead.

He was enjoying a well-earned break in the Collingwood Arms when one of the regulars, a collier and a friend of Joe’s, joined him at his table. Joe downed the pint of beer in front of him and gave a repeat order for both of them. When it arrived and had been emptied with equal speed, his friend said, with appreciation, ‘Doan ‘ang abaht, do yer?’ and ordered and brought over two refills. He seemed to be nursing a grievance.

‘Not like that bloody furriner we ‘ad in ‘ere lars night.’

This seemed promising. Joe asked for particulars.

It seemed that a stranger (‘a nasty-looking bag of beef’) had sat for half an hour looking at his beer and occasionally sipping it (‘like a perishing leddy’) before making off through the door at the end of the bar and, a crowning insult to the pub and to Great Britain generally, had left half his beer undrunk on the table.

Joe described Weil.

His friend thought it might be, but couldn’t be sure. If by any chance Joe wanted to know where the man had gone, he should have a word with old Nancy, who didn’t come out much these days – reasonably, since she had lost both her legs in a dockside accident – but sat in her front window in Beckett Avenue watching the world go by.

Five minutes later Joe was talking to old Nancy through her front window. From where she sat she commanded a good view of the recreation ground and she had seen this odd figure (‘like a great hape, reely, Mr Narrowbone’) climbing in at one end and out at the other into Gooseley Lane. After which, it seemed, he had turned to the left and Nancy had lost sight of him.