Blackstone and the Endgame (18 page)

‘Just answer the question!' Patterson barked.

‘Yes, he got a letter, and the next day he was gone. And all his pals went at the same time, leaving me to build up my business again from scratch. It just goes to show, doesn't it?'

‘Just goes to show what?'

‘It goes to show that, even if they seem pleasant enough on the surface, you can never trust a Hun.'

T
he tram's terminus was at a large arch, which might have looked majestic but for the poisonous yellow sky that framed it.

‘Before you ask, that's the Narva Triumphal Arch,' Tanya said skittishly. ‘Alexander the First had it built at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. His idea was that it was the first thing the soldiers would see when they returned to the city. It was their reward – and the only one they got – for risking their own lives and seeing so many of their comrades die.'

‘Natasha really does despise the tsars and all they stand for, doesn't she?' Blackstone asked.

‘Natasha doesn't know any better,' Tanya said ambiguously.

Beyond the arch, there were half a dozen factories, each with several tall chimney-stacks pumping out filth into the atmosphere.

‘That's where we're going,' Tanya said, pointing to a long, rectangular building with very tiny windows.

‘A dark, satanic mill,' Blackstone murmured, almost to himself.

‘What did you say?' Tanya asked.

‘A dark satanic mill,' Blackstone repeated. ‘It's from a poem by—'

‘William Blake,' Tanya interrupted. ‘I know.'

‘Must be a hell of a place to work in,' Blackstone mused.

‘No doubt it would be,' Tanya replied. ‘But it is not where the poor souls employed by the Narva Cotton Company
work
– it is where they
live
.'

An old man in a shabby uniform, which included an ancient cutlass, was standing guard at the entrance to the dormitory block. When he saw Tanya, he smiled and gestured that they should go inside.

‘A member of the party?' Blackstone asked.

‘A sympathizer,' Tanya replied.

The inside was indeed a vision of hell. It seemed to be one large room, and it was crammed with row after row of narrow bunk beds. There was little light and virtually no air, and the whole place stank of stale cabbage and human sweat.

Four men were standing at the end of the nearest row. From their clothes, it was clear that three of them were workers in the mill. They had careworn faces and were old before their time. The fourth man was wearing a suit and looked shabbily respectable. He was perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven, and his eyes burned with the fire of a true fanatic.

Tanya greeted them all, then pointed to Blackstone and gave a short speech. When she'd finished, the men all nodded sagely.

‘I've just told them you're a comrade who's part of the revolutionary struggle in England,' she said. ‘For some reason, that seems to impress them.'

‘Maybe not everyone in Russia is quite as anti-British as you are,' Blackstone suggested.

‘We are going to discuss our strategy,' Tanya told him. ‘From time to time, I will translate what has been said. I don't want to, but since you are supposed to be a fellow revolutionary, my comrades will expect it – so please try to act as if you are interested.'

‘I
am
interested,' Blackstone said.

The strategy ‘discussion' went on for half an hour. Most of the talking was done by the man in the shabby suit, and when one of the workers tried to interrupt him, he would wave his hands extravagantly in the air.

‘It has been decided that the strike will not end until the workers' demands are met,' Tanya told Blackstone at the end of it.

‘And what
are
their demands?' Blackstone asked.

‘A fifty per cent increase in wages and a twenty per cent decrease in hours,' Tanya said.

‘No, that's not
their
demands – that's what your mate in the suit wants them to ask for,' Blackstone said. ‘What do they want for themselves?'

Tanya looked at him suspiciously. ‘Vladimir did not tell me you could speak Russian,' she said.

‘Nor can I,' Blackstone replied. ‘But I can read men, and I've been reading this lot for the last half-hour. So what is it they
actually
want?'

‘We will talk about it on the way to the factory, when my comrade is not reading you in the way that you appear to have read him,' Tanya said.

‘I take that to mean that he's not coming to the factory himself,' Blackstone said.

‘No, he is far too valuable to the party – and to the workers' movement in general – to be put at risk over such a minor skirmish.'

‘Or, to put it another way, it'll all be left up to the poor bloody infantry, as it always is,' Blackstone said.

‘I'm afraid I don't understand what you just said,' Tanya told him.

But she did – he could see that she did.

The pub had been heaving when they'd walked in, ten minutes earlier, but now most of the men had drifted off for their Christmas dinners, and they virtually had the place to themselves.

Patterson looked down at the pint of best bitter he was holding in his big hand. Knowing, as he did, that the chances were he'd soon be back in prison, it was tempting to drink as much beer as he could force down himself. But there was still work to be done, and he needed a clear head to do it. So, with a sigh, he put the glass back on the table, untouched.

‘We've reached a dead end, haven't we?' Ellie Carr asked.

‘Were you expecting to find Max had gone back to his old lodgings?' Patterson asked.

‘No, but …'

‘Then what were you expecting?'

Ellie shrugged helplessly. ‘I don't know what I was expecting.'

‘Just by establishing that Max did live there once, we've taken a big step towards finding him,' Patterson said.

‘Have we? I don't see how.'

‘We started this investigation in the belief that what Hartington said about Max still being in London is true, didn't we?'

‘Yes, we did, but now I've started asking myself
why
we should believe him. What does he know? He's a posh solicitor. He's probably never brushed shoulders with a criminal in his life.'

‘No, he probably hasn't,' Patterson agreed, ‘but he most likely got the information from whoever's paying him.'

‘If the man who's paying him knows that Max is still in London, why doesn't he simply tell us where to find him?'

‘I've no idea,' Patterson admitted, ‘but if Hartington's convinced that he's still here, then so am I.'

‘And I suppose I am, too,' Ellie conceded. ‘So what's our next step?'

‘The next step is based on our knowledge that Max once lived in Hooper Street and that he was probably involved in some sort of criminal activity,' Patterson said.

‘Go on.'

‘In some ways, criminals are a lot like animals – they're never really comfortable away from the places they know. So if Max
is
in London, he won't be
too
far from Hooper Street.'

‘Not
too
far?' Ellie said quizzically.

‘That's right,' Patterson agreed. ‘He won't have gone to ground anywhere he's likely to run into Mrs Wilson, of course, but I'd be surprised if he's more than half a mile away from Commercial Road. So that's the area we'll concentrate our search on.'

‘So we show Max's photograph to people on the street and in the shops and pubs, and see if anyone recognizes him?' Ellie asked.

‘That's right.'

‘It's one of the most crowded areas of this very crowded city,' Ellie said. ‘How many people do you think there are living there?'

‘Quite a lot,' Patterson admitted.

‘The strike started when a group of mothers arrived half an hour late for work because their children were sick,' Tanya said, as they walked towards the mill. ‘That was nothing unusual – children are always getting sick in that place, and once one comes down with something, it is not long before a lot of the others catch it. But what was different this time was that it was the older children who had caught the fever, and that made things especially difficult.'

‘Why?' Blackstone asked.

Tanya snorted with contempt at his ignorance. ‘The older children can look after the babies when they are sick, but the babies cannot look after the older children,' she said.

‘Of course – I should have seen that,' Blackstone agreed humbly.

‘The mothers asked if one of them could go back to the dormitory in the middle of the morning, to check on the sick children,' Tanya said. ‘The foreman told them they were employed as cotton spinners, not nurses. The women accepted that. They knew that perhaps one or more of the children would be dead by the time their shift was over, but there was no guarantee that a visit would save them – and if they lost their jobs by disobeying the foreman, they would have no money to feed
any
of their children, and they would
all
starve to death.'

‘I hope that sometime during this strike I meet that bastard,' Blackstone growled. ‘I'll teach him how to be compassionate, even if it kills him.'

‘There was worse yet to come,' Tanya said. ‘The foreman told them that since they were half an hour late, they would be fined half a day's pay. That was too much for even the downtrodden to take, and they walked out.'

‘So, at the start of their meeting with your mate …'

‘Josef. His name is Josef.'

‘At the start of their meeting with Josef, what were they demanding as a condition for returning to work?' Blackstone asked.

‘They wanted the half-day's pay that the women had been docked reinstated, and the right for at least one of them to go back to the dormitory when children were sick.'

‘They weren't asking for a fifty per cent increase in wages and a twenty per cent decrease in hours?'

‘No.'

‘But your comrade talked them into it?'

‘Josef can be very persuasive – and the workers look up to him. They know nothing beyond the villages they came from and the mill in which they now work. But he is an educated man, wise to the ways of the world, and if he tells them something, they believe it to be correct.'

‘And what
did
he tell them?'

‘He said that we have the owners over a barrel and that they are bound to concede.'

‘Was he telling the truth?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘So why did he lie to them?'

‘It was
unlikely
that the employer would agree to their first demand – withdrawing the fines and allowing one woman to visit the dormitory – but there was always a slight possibility that he would.'

‘And wouldn't that be a good thing?'

Tanya snorted again. ‘The important thing is not that matters are resolved, but that there is a strike. Real change does not come through gradualism; it comes through confrontation.'

‘And to hell with the mill workers?' Blackstone asked.

‘Josef says that you cannot make an omelette without first breaking a few heads,' Tanya said.

‘You mean “eggs”,' Blackstone corrected her.

‘I mean
heads
,' Tanya said firmly. ‘Or to put it another way, Josef believes that there can be no victory if there is not some suffering first. And he is not alone in this belief – Vladimir, who is his antithesis, believes exactly the same thing.'

There was a large square in front of the mill, and as they approached it, they could see that a crowd of several hundred people – men, women and children – had gathered in front of its gates.

‘They're all worried that the owner will try to bring in new workers from the outside to replace them,' Tanya explained.

‘Should the children be here, when there's a chance of things turning violent?' Blackstone asked.

‘The hope is that there will be no violence
because
the children are here,' Tanya said. ‘It is a tactic that has often been used in the past.'

‘And does it always work?'

Tanya shrugged. ‘It
usually
works,' she said cautiously.

The people in the crowd were cold – and probably hungry – but they were in the sort of good spirits that people often are when – after one humiliation too many – they have finally decided to take a stand.

Tanya walked up and down the line, shaking the men's hands, kissing the women and rubbing the children's heads.

She was a very different character from the one he was getting to know, Blackstone thought. This Tanya – or perhaps he should start thinking of her as Natasha – was both liked and respected by the people she was talking to.

She
had
to be convincing in this role, he realized – she would never be given important information to pass on to Vladimir if she wasn't. Yet he still marvelled at the way she could compartmentalize her mind so completely.

Two days earlier, she had been the staunch defender of tsardom who had demanded that Rasputin be killed before he could tarnish the image of the monarchy any further. Yet here she was, encouraging people to take a stand against that same tsardom even if a few heads were broken in the process.

He wondered which side she was really on – and then wondered if she even knew that herself.

The crowd had been quite loud up until that moment, but now a sudden hush descended over it, and in the near distance, there was the sound of horses' hooves on cobblestones.

Clip-clop-clip. Clip-clop-clip.

It would have been impossible to distinguish the hooves over the noise, Blackstone thought, so the people hadn't fallen silent because of what they'd heard; they'd done it because of what they
felt
.