The Hidden Family (18 page)

The cab arrived. Miriam paid the driver and stepped out. The door to the shop was already unlocked, so she went straight in and opened up the office. It was small but modern, furnished in wood and equipped with electric lamps, a telephone, and one of the weird chord-key typewriters balanced precariously on one of the high, slanted writing desks. It was also freezing cold until she lit the gas fire. Only when it was blazing did she go through the mail then head for the lab.

The lab was a former woodworking shop, and right now it was a mess. Roger had moved a row of benches up against one wall, balanced glass-fronted cabinets on top of them, and made enthusiastic use of her line of credit at an instrument maker’s shop. The results included a small potter’s kiln—converted into a makeshift furnace—and a hole in the ceiling where tomorrow a carpenter would call to begin building a fume cupboard. Roger was already at work, digging into a wooden crate that he’d manhandled into the center of the floor. “Good morning to you,” said Miriam. “How’s it going?”

“I’ll tell you when I get into this,” Roger grunted. He was in his late twenties, untidy even in a formal three-piece suit, and blessed with none of the social graces that would have allowed him to hang onto his job when the Salisbury Works had shed a third of their staff three months earlier. Rudeness concealed shyness; he’d been completely nonplussed by Miriam at first, and was still uneasy in her presence.

“That’ll be the chrysotile from Union Quebecois,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“It should be. If they haven’t sent us rock salt by mistake again.” He laid down his crowbar and straightened up panting, his breath steaming in the cold air.

“If they have, they’ll pay for it.” She grinned. “Go make yourself a pot of tea, I don’t want you freezing to death on the job.”

“Um, yes, Ma’am.” Roger shuffled toward the other back room—the one Miriam intended to have converted into that luxury, a kitchen and indoor toilet block for the work force—that currently held only a cast-iron wood stove, a stack of lumber, and a kettle. He gave her a wide berth, as if being female in the workplace might be contagious. Miriam watched his back disappear before she knelt to pick up the crowbar, and went around the lid of the crate levering out the retaining nails.
Men.
She laid the crowbar down and dusted her skirt off before he returned, bearing a chipped mug containing some liquid as dark as coffee.

“I think you’ll find it easier to open now,” Miriam remarked, laying one hand on the lid. “What have you got in mind for resin processing this week?”

“I was thinking about the vulcanization process,” Roger muttered. “I want to see how varying the sulfate concentration affects the stiffness of the finished mixture.”

“I was asking about resins,” Miriam pointed out. “In particular, the epoxide sample I suggested you look into on Thursday. Have you done anything with it yet?”

“Um, I was getting to it.” Roger glanced at her face then looked away bashfully.

“That’s why I suggested a timetable,” said Miriam. “You can estimate how long each batch will take to run; you already do that for yourself, don’t you? Put the timetable on the blackboard and I won’t have to keep asking you the same questions.”

“Oh, alright then.” He nodded.

“I wanted the epoxide sample running as soon as possible because we have a possible customer,” she added.

“A customer?” He brightened visibly.

“Yes, a customer.” She kept her face sober. “But we won’t have them if we don’t have a suitable product, will we? They’re going to want an extensive range of samples in about four weeks time, for their own materials testing people. That’s why I want you to get on to the epoxide-based samples as soon as possible. If you time the kiln runs right, you can probably put your sulfate experiments through at the same time. Just as long as they don’t hold up the epoxide.”

Oh, right. I’ll do it that way, then,” he said, almost carelessly. And he would. She’d met Roger’s type before, hammering keyboards into submission in dot-com start-ups. He’d work overnight if he had to, without even noticing, just to get the product ready to meet the deadline—as long as he had a target to aim for. All this thrashing about with rubber and vulcanization processes was just a distraction.

“I’m going to be in the office today,” she added. “I’ve got an idea to work on. The carpenter will be in here tomorrow to work on the fume cupboard, and then the kitchen. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t happen to know any model engineers looking for work? I have some mechanical assemblies to get started.”

“Mechanical—” he almost went cross-eyed. “Why?”

“A better way of applying this wonderful high-friction material to the task of stopping a moving vehicle,” she pointed out. “You think this high-friction compound will work well if you just clamp it to a pneumonic? It’ll work—right until the rubber wall of the wheel wears through and it blows out. What we need is a hub-mounted disk bolted to the wheel with a block of brake material to either side, which can be clamped or released by hydraulic calipers, balanced to apply force evenly. With me so far?”

“Um, I think so.” He looked abstracted. “I, I don’t know any model artificers. I’m sorry. But I’m sure you’ll find someone.”

“Oh I think I will, indeed I do.” She headed back to the office, leaving Roger wrestling a ten-kilogram lump of very high-grade rock wool onto his workbench.

The day passed in a blur. Miriam had rigged a travel transformer for her laptop, which she kept in a locked drawer in the office along with an inkjet printer and a small digitizer tablet. The CAD software was a pain to use with such a small screen, but far better than the huge draftsman’s board and ink pens in the far corner of the room. Between calls she lost herself in an extruded 3D model of a brake assembly—one of her own invention, crude but recognizable as the ancestor of late twentieth-century disk brakes. Another file awaited her attention—steel radial bands for reinforcing tires. The idea was sound, but she kept having to divert into her physics and engineering textbooks. Her calculus was rustier than she was willing to admit, and she was finding some of the work extremely hard.

But perfection didn’t matter.
Getting there first
mattered. Get there first and just-good-enough and you could buy the specialists to polish the design to perfection later. This was the lesson Miriam had learned from watching over the shoulders of her Silicon Valley colleagues, and from watching a myriad of biotech companies rise and fall—and it was the lesson she intended to shove up New Britain’s industrialists so hard it made them squeak.

One o’clock. Miriam blinked, suddenly dizzy. Her buttocks ached from the hard stool, she was hungry, and she needed the lavatory. She stood up and put the notebook PC away, then headed for the toilet—an outhouse in the backyard. Afterwards she slipped out the front door in search of lunch. Of such elements were a working day made.

In the public environment of the hotel, or the lab, she cut an eccentric, possibly scandalous figure. On the streets she was just another woman, better dressed than most, hurrying about her errands. Anonymity of a kind:
Treasure it while you can,
she told herself as she lined up at a street corner where a baker’s boy had set up a stand to sell hot bacon rolls.
It won’t last.

She returned to the office and had been busy for an hour—phoning her lawyer, then calling a commercial agent at what passed for a recruiting house—when there was a peremptory knock on the side window. “Who’s there?” she demanded, standing up to open it.

“Police. Inspector Smith at your service.” A bushy moustache and a suspicious, beefy face stood behind an imposing warrant card with a crown and heraldic beasts cavorting atop it chased her in through the open window. “Homeland Defense Bureau. Are you Mrs. Fletcher?”

“Uh, yes.” Flustered, Miriam tried to pull herself together. “How can I be of service?”

“I’d like a word with you if I may.”

“Ah, do come in, then.” Miriam hurried to open the door.
Shit, what did I do wrong?
She wondered. There was a deep hollow icy feeling in her stomach as she hauled the door open and smiled, ingratiatingly. “What can I do for you, officer?” she asked, leaving the door and retreating behind the front desk.

“Ah, well.” He nodded, then remembered his manners and took his hat off.

Bizarre,
thought Miriam, fascinated as a bird facing a snake. To her surprise she realized that she wasn’t frightened for herself—only for her plans, which depended on continuity and legality for their success.

“Been in business long?” asked the Inspector.

“No,” she said, tight-lipped. “This is a new venture.”

“Ah
well
.”

He looked around slowly. Luckily she’d put the computer away before lunch, and everything was much as it should be in an office. He moved to shove the door closed. “Don’t do that,” Miriam said quickly.

“Alright.” He found the one comfortable chair in the office—a wooden swivel chair too low to work at the writing desks—and looked her in the eyes. “How long have you known Erasmus Burgeson?”

“Huh?” Miriam blinked. “Not long. A few weeks?”

“I see.” Smith nodded portentiously. “How did you come to know him?”

“Is this an official investigation?”

“I’m asking the questions. How did you come to know him?”

“Uh.” Miriam considered her options.
Not official,
she decided. “If this isn’t an official investigation, why should I tell you?”

“Because.” He looked irritated. “Little lady, if you don’t want to cooperate while it’s unofficial, I can go away and waste my time
making
it official. And then you’ll have to cooperate, and it will be the worse for you because I won’t have to knock on your door polite, like. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly.” She didn’t smile. “I first met Erasmus Burgeson because one of your own officers directed me to him when I asked if he knew where I could find a pawnbroker. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“
Ah,
well.” Smith looked even more annoyed now, but not in her direction. “You wouldn’t happen to know which officer this would be?”

“Hmm. He’d have been on duty in Highgate Close on, um, the morning of Saturday the sixteenth. I think he thought I might be lost. That might be enough for you to find his notebook.”

“Humph. So you asked for a pawnbroker and he gave you directions to Burgeson. Is that all? Why did you want a pawnbroker in the first place?”

The Inspector’s blunt manner was beginning to annoy Miriam.
But that’s what he wants,
she realized suddenly:
He wants me to make a slip. Hmm.
“I arrived on the India Line ship
Vespasian
that morning, after a crossing from Ceylon,” she told him, very deliberately keeping to her story—the
Vespasian
had indeed docked that day, with some passengers aboard, but was conveniently halfway across the Atlantic by now. “I was so preoccupied with packing my posessions and getting ashore that I forgot to ask the purser to convert my scrip to honest currency. In addition, clothing suitable for the climate of Ceylon is inadequate here. So I thought a sensible first step would be to find a pawnshop and exchange an old pair of earrings and a small pearl necklace for a decent wool suit and the wherewithal to find a hotel room and cable my banker.”

All of which was, very remotely, true—and indeed Erasmus had arranged, for a fee and by way of a friend of a fellow traveler, for the purser of the
Vespasian
to find a passenger of her name in the ship’s manifest should anyone ask—but it was only as Miriam spun it out in front of Smith’s skeptical gaze that she realized how thin a tale it sounded. If she was in Smith’s shoes she could punch holes in it with very little effort. But Smith simply nodded. “I see,” he said. “Your husband left you adequately provided for, didn’t he?”

Miriam nodded. “Indeed.”
Keep it close. Make him dig.

“And so you dabble in manufacturing.” It wasn’t phrased as a question, so Miriam didn’t answer. She just sat tight wearing a politely interested expression, wishing for the phone to ring or something to disturb the silence that stretched out uncomfortably.

“I said, you dabble in manufacturing.”

“I do not ‘dabble’ in anything, Mr. Smith,” Miriam finally stated in her iciest tone. “You’re a police officer. You can go ask the patent office questions—I’m sure Mr. Sagetree will be able to tell you whether there is any merit in the applications I filed last week. The first
three,
Inspector, of the many I have in mind.”

“Ah. I stand corrected.” Smith leaned back in his chair. “Well then, may I rephrase? Do you have any opinion of Burgeson’s business? Does he strike you as in any way at all being odd?”

Miriam shook her head and allowed an irritated expression to cross her face. “He’s a pawnbroker,” she said. “He’s a very literate pawnbroker with a good line in conversation, but I imagine sitting in the back of a shop gives him a lot of time to read, don’t you?”

“A literate pawnbroker. So this would explain why you have visited his establishment on three occasions?”

Shit, shit, shit
—“The first time, as I’ve told you, I needed money and suitable attire. The second time—let me see, on my first visit I had noticed a hat that was not then out of hock. I went back to see if it was available, and also to redeem my earrings and necklace. On the
third
occasion—well, he’d shown me some of the antiquarian books various of his customers pawned when they fell upon hard times. I confess I was quite partial to a couple of them.” She forced a smile. “Is that a crime?”

“No.” Inspector Smith stood, unfolding smoothly to a good six feet. He was a huge, imposing man, overweight but built like a rugby player, and now she noticed that his nose had been broken, although it had set well. “But you should be careful who you associate with, Mrs. Fletcher. Some people question Mr. Burgeson’s patriotism and devotion to the Crown, you know. He keeps strange company, and you would not want to be taken for one among them.”