The Diamond Thief (6 page)

Seven

The Truth in the Lie

“Get off me!” Thaddeus struggled, trying to free himself from the man’s grasp, which was surprisingly strong. “Who are you? Leave me alone!”

The intruder ignored Thaddeus’ protests and dragged him towards the exit as Glove and his men got back to their feet. Thaddeus was propelled through the door and stumbled down the wet steps outside, faltering on the cobbles as the stranger forced him onwards.

“Boy, if you don’t run now we’ll both be caught.”

“Then let us be caught! You shot Collins! He was trying to help me!”

“And so am I! It was only sleeping gas, for God’s sake! Come on, Thaddeus – run!”

Something in the man’s voice made Thaddeus look up, meeting the stranger’s eyes. They were shaded by the night and his ridiculously bushy eyebrows, but still Rec caught a distinctive flash of blue in their depths. He started.

“Professor?”

“Of course it’s me. Who did you expect, the Queen of Sheba? Now run, damn you!”

The Professor took off, out of Scotland Yard and into the flickering gaslight. Thaddeus kept close on his heels, hearing the shouts and sharp tin whistles of the police behind them. It seemed as if the whole of the Yard had joined the chase. The Professor ducked down one street that was swathed in darkness, and then turned a sharp right and ran straight down another.

“Professor,” Thaddeus managed to say, between heaving breaths. “Professor, you’re leading us straight towards High Holborn. There will be people everywhere!”

“Exactly,” the disguised professor called back over his shoulder, without a pause. “Safety in numbers, boy! Keep close, now!”

The street they were on suddenly opened out into a wider thoroughfare, which even at this early hour was busy with carriages. The Professor didn’t cross the road, as Thaddeus had expected, but instead charged towards a hansom cab parked at the corner of the British Museum. He opened the door, shouting something to the driver before looking back towards Thaddeus.

“Come on! Hurry!”

Thaddeus vaulted up the cab’s step and into its interior, crashing against the soft seat as his friend jumped in behind him. The Professor raised his fist and hammered once against the wooden panel beside Thaddeus. The cab took off at once, sliding smoothly into the channel of anonymous horse-drawn traffic streaming down the road.

“Ahh!” exclaimed the Professor, leaning back against the seat, out of breath. “That was a close one, eh?”

Thaddeus shook his head, also breathing hard. “You’re mad. Completely, totally mad! And what have you done to yourself?”

The Professor laughed, leaning forward and running a hand over the blank canvas of his shiny head. “Do you like it? I think it’s rather fetching, myself.”

Thaddeus reached out and hesitantly poked at the pale skin. It was slightly spongy to the touch. “That’s horrible! And those eyebrows! That nose! You look… awful!”

The Professor leaned back and sighed. “Ah well, never mind, I’ll remove it as soon as we get to the workshop. It did the trick though, didn’t it? Even you failed to recognise me. And if I hadn’t done what I did, you’d be languishing in a cell right now.”

Thaddeus looked out of the window, watching the night streets of London pass by, lit by the occasional tame halo of gaslight. He suddenly felt very, very tired. The motion of the cab rocked him from side to side as it rattled over the cobbles, moving east. He slipped into a doze, and didn’t wake until the driver pulled the horse to a standstill. Thaddeus blinked sleepily as the Professor leaned over and poked him with a bony finger.

“Come on, then, Thaddeus Rec,” he said. “Let’s get inside, eh?”

Thaddeus stumbled from the cab, realizing that they were at Limehouse Basin, which meant they were going to the Professor’s workshop. The dock was already busy, even though dawn had yet to colour the sky above the grimy wharves. Men shouted as they heaved goods onto the waiting boats that bobbed about in the oily, choppy water of the Thames. He nodded to a couple that he recognised as they skirted the edge of the Basin, faces he knew from his occasional drinks in The Grapes public house, just a few minutes’ walk away.

They slipped down one of the alleyways behind Oliver’s Wharf. The Professor glanced about him before pulling a heavy bunch of keys from his pocket and slotting one into the lock of an unimportant-looking door. He pushed it open and disappeared into darkness. Thaddeus waited until he heard the sound of a match struck, and the faint light of a candle lit his way. Then he followed the Professor, stepping inside and closing the door behind him.

“Excuse me for a few moments, won’t you?” called the Professor, disappearing into his private study at the other end of the room. “Just going to remove this face you so heartily disapprove of.”

Rec nodded absently as he shut the study door. He had been here a hundred times and had spent hours tinkering with the objects gathered about him, but he still found himself taking an extra breath when he entered the workshop. For one thing, it was just so huge. It took up the whole lower floor of the Wharf, and at some point the Professor had knocked through all the walls save the supporting ones, leaving the space open. Into the resulting cavern was crammed every manner of wonderful, inexplicable mechanical gadgetry, creating a merry mess that overflowed the many workbenches and shelves and spilled onto the floor in piles of cogs, springs, levers and other bits and pieces.

One bench was dedicated to the workings of clocks, because the Professor was convinced that there was a way to make a pocket watch that would communicate with another watch of the same design, worn by a different person. He thought it would be possible to send messages from one to the other by means of a small electrical current, and so to experiment he had taken hundreds of them apart and wired them all up in different ways. Their collective ticking produced a whirring hum that filled Thaddeus’ ears like a swarm of bees as he passed.

Then there was the rocket pack. If Thaddeus was honest, this was the invention that he was most excited about. He kept trying to persuade the Professor to let him test it out, but the answer was always, “It’s not ready yet.” The idea was to create a steam-powered engine small enough for a man to carry on his back. The Professor was currently working on the idea that if he built a cylinder that produced a vacuum at one end and propulsion at the other, the force and motion could lift a grown man off the ground. It was a dangerous enterprise – the boiling steam alone could kill a man – but Thaddeus couldn’t wait to try it. Imagine being able to walk in the air – to fly like a bird. Of course, the Professor hadn’t quite worked out how to steer the thing yet, but Thaddeus had faith that it was only a matter of time.

The young detective dropped into a chair in front of the bench that seemed to hold the secrets of the Professor’s latest weapon – the gas pistol he had used so effectively back at Scotland Yard. Thaddeus had never seen it before. He set about trying to understand how it worked while he waited for his friend to return.

“How did you know?” Thaddeus asked, once the Professor had changed out of his disguise. The transformation was remarkable – no one would have known that the man who had burst into the police station was the same man that bustled about the place now. The bald head was gone, replaced by a flash of fine white hair, and the bushy eyebrows and hooked nose had vanished, too. It was impossible to pinpoint the Professor’s age – the eyes said late thirties, but the hair suggested he was much older. Thaddeus had never had the courage to ask.

“How did I know what?”

“About what was happening at the station. I mean, you just turned up, out of nowhere.”

The Professor was busy taking apart the weapon he had used on Collins, cleaning it down and refilling the chamber of purple liquid from a heated glass vial that had been steaming gently over a Bunsen burner.

“I had been listening in, dear boy,” he said. “To begin with I thought that man – Glove – was being merely unpleasant. Then I realized he was actually a complete fool. And a dangerous one at that, I’ll warrant.”

Thaddeus frowned. “Listening in? Whatever do you mean?”

The Professor carefully replaced the glass vial on its stand before going to Thaddeus’ coat, which he had folded across the empty chair beside him. The Professor shook it out, his hand reaching for the bottom seam, where the lining met the outer wool. He probed about for a bit, and then took a sharp knife from the workbench and quickly slit it open.

“Professor!” Thaddeus said in dismay, “that’s my only coat!”

“Please don’t fuss, Rec,” said the older man. “It’s easily repaired. Have you never heard of a needle and thread? Ah-ha, there!”

The Professor pulled a small metal object – or rather, a collection of small metal objects – from Thaddeus’ coat. Among the tangle of parts, Thaddeus could see several tiny cogs, a miniature gauge and some metal piping, as well as what looked like a small cylinder at the centre, covered in a very thin layer of foil. Attached to the gauge was a small, red jewel that looked to Thaddeus like garnet. The object was fascinating and beautiful.

“What is it?” he asked, taking the device from the Professor’s hands and turning it over, careful not to break any of the fragile parts.

“Well, in part it is a very small friction engine,” said the Professor. “The smallest I’ve ever built – in fact, I’ll wager it is the smallest anyone has ever built. It’s started by external movement. That’s why I put it at the bottom of your coat. When you put the garment on and begin to walk, the engine starts up.”

“I don’t understand,” Thaddeus said. “You said you were listening? To what happened at the station?”

“Ah, yes,” said the Professor. “Well you see, that’s the truly genius bit of this device. Once the thing’s warmed up and ticking over nicely, it can send a signal.”

“A signal?”

“Yes. It’s a recording, really. It works like Mr Edison’s phonograph – the one that caused all the fuss last year. But unlike him, I got it working properly. The key is the tin foil, you know! He was using wax, which was simply foolish. You see here–” he pointed to the cylinder at the centre of the device. “When the engine starts, the stylus begins to make little indentations in the foil that, when played back at a faster rate, will recreate the sounds it is picking up. It can only store two or three minutes at a time, so once it is full it uses its friction energy to transmit to a larger unit – the one in question is on the roof of Scotland Yard, incidentally. I put it there a few months back – and that relays to this...” In full flow now, the Professor pointed expansively to a large phonograph that stood on another workbench. It had been augmented with an extra speaker horn and a tower of thin metal filaments that disappeared into the ceiling.

“The same patterns that were recorded at your end are etched onto another, larger cylinder at this end, you see,” the Professor continued to an astonished Thaddeus. “I have it set to play back immediately and continuously, as soon as the friction engine is activated. Of course, there’s a little delay. That’s why I was almost too late. It’s lucky you’re a ditherer by nature, my boy!”

Thaddeus was speechless for a few moments, looking between the tiny device that had been hidden in his coat and the gramophone.

“It’s amazing,” he said eventually. “Simply... amazing.”

“Yes, it is rather, isn’t it?”

“You’re a genius.”

The Professor sniffed happily. “Oh well, Thaddeus… genius is as genius does, you know.”

Then something else occurred to Thaddeus. He frowned. “Were you spying on me?”

The older man looked genuinely shocked. “What? Of course not!”

“But you put this in my coat,” Thaddeus pointed out. “How long has it been there? What were you hoping to hear? Or were you using me to get inside the police station? Is that what this is all about?”

The Professor placed a hand on his arm. “Thaddeus, Thaddeus,” he soothed. “It wasn’t anything of the kind. I merely wanted to be able to test the machine, that’s all. It’s far from perfect yet.”

“Well, why didn’t you just ask me to test it for you? You know I always try to help with your experiments if I can.”

The Professor sighed. “What time did you get home last night?”

“Well, I haven’t actually been home yet.”

“And the night before?”

“Err...”

“And the night before that?” The Professor held up a hand before he could reply. “My dear boy, you are never anywhere but at work. You are always at Scotland Yard, or about police business. And I knew you would never agree to allow me to listen into the police station. But who else could I ask? So… there we are.”

Thaddeus sighed. “You shouldn’t have done it, you know.”

“Ah, but think of the benefits!” the Professor exclaimed, gleefully. “Think of the criminal organizations we could take down! No one could hide from the law!”

Thaddeus had to smile at the Professor’s enthusiasm, though his humour soon turned cold. “I don’t think I’ll ever be catching criminals again,” he said, quietly. “I’m a wanted man myself now.”

The Professor patted his shoulder again. “Don’t you worry about that. Now, I don’t think I caught everything clearly with my friction machine. Tell me all about it – start from the beginning.”

And so Thaddeus did. He left nothing out, from the night at the circus just three days ago when he had seen, and tried to save, the girl they called ‘Little Bird’, right up until when the Professor had burst through the doors of Scotland Yard just an hour or so ago. In the re-telling of it all, the events of the past three days seemed surreal and unbelievable even to Thaddeus, but the Professor listened patiently, nodding here and there.

“Well,” he said, when the story was done. “This is a curious matter and no mistake. First things first – you’d better give me those night-glasses. I’ll see if I can get them working.” Thaddeus dug them out of his coat pocket and handed them over as the Professor went on, “What do you plan to do next?”

Thaddeus shrugged. “What can I do, except try to find the real thief? She’s out there somewhere. I just have to find her.”