Authors: David Downing
The inspector was just admitting that their search of the house had proved fruitless when a smug-looking constable emerged from the front room and presented him with a small piece of cardboard. “It was down the back of the settee.”
It was a railway ticket, a return from London Victoria to Ford, dated July 29.
“Where the hell is Ford?” the inspector asked, handing it over.
McColl had no idea, but even a week-old ticket might provide
some sort of clue to where the eight had gone. And there didn’t seem to be anything else.
He talked to the neighbor and asked her about the four men she’d seen that morning. One description fit Brady, but none matched Tiernan or Colm.
When he reached Whitehall, the first thing he asked was how they’d found the house.
“Ah, that was my brain wave,” Cumming admitted. “After you’d gone yesterday, I realized that we’d neglected the German end of business, and I got the police to run a check on all the London properties that German nationals had bought in the last couple of years. There were more than thirty of them, and they didn’t get round to the Lambeth house until a couple of hours ago. Too late, I’m afraid. Of course, all the obvious places are being watched, but these people can make the headlines without blowing up Buckingham Palace or Nelson’s Column—a department store would do, or even a couple of crowded pubs.”
McColl wasn’t convinced. “I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re ruthless enough, but they’re not idiots. Killing a lot of innocent bystanders won’t win them many supporters, and it certainly won’t help the Germans. The only enemy they actually have in common is the British army.”
“Which is mostly on trains, en route to France.”
McColl rummaged in his pocket for the railway ticket. “This was found in the house,” he said, passing it across the desk. “Do you know where Ford is?”
“I seem to remember passing through it. On the line that runs along the south coast, I think. Let’s have a look,” he said, reaching for his atlas.
It was McColl who found it, just south of Arundel, a station without so much as a village.
“There’s nothing there,” Cumming complained.
“Yes there is,” McColl pointed out. “There’s a river, and that means a bridge. Which ports are the troops leaving from?”
“Portsmouth and Southampton.”
“Well, take out that bridge and you’ve cut the coastline and one of the major routes from London.”
“My God, I hope not.” Cumming stared at the map. “But look, there’s lots of other lines. They couldn’t cut them all.”
“There can’t be that many,” McColl countered, “and they don’t need to cut them all. Cut the main ones and you’ll be left with a few minor routes, single-track most likely. We’d still get the soldiers to port, but how much longer would it take? And that’s what they’re after—delays. The longer it takes our army to get across, the better chance the Germans have of knocking out the French.”
Cumming sat back in his chair and released an explosive breath. “Go to Victoria,” he said; “the railway police office. I’ll ring ahead and tell them you’re coming. They’ll know who to ask if any of this makes sense.”
McColl was halfway through the door when Cumming called him back.
“You’d better have this,” he said, taking a gun from one of his drawers.
It was a Webley revolver, which McColl tucked into the back of his belt, taking care not to stretch his wounded shoulder.
His automobile was still outside, and the drive to Victoria took only a couple of minutes. Both the forecourt and the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway concourse were crowded with uniforms, and he was taken back to the day, almost fifteen years earlier, when he’d caught a troop train from Platform 12, bound for Portsmouth, the sea, and South Africa. It had all felt like a great adventure, and most of these soldiers seemed equally deluded—laughing, joking, and teasing one another, looking for all the world like they couldn’t wait to engage the enemy.
At the railway police office, a middle-aged commander was waiting to escort him back across the concourse and up an iron staircase to the room overlooking the Brighton line platforms
where the engineering department had its headquarters. Once he had outlined his theory, maps were spread out on a table and all the lines to the ports in question duly noted and described. As he had guessed, cutting them all would be a very tall order, but just severing the four main lines would greatly reduce the chances of getting the army to sea on time.
But where would they cut them? The bridge at Ford was one of many that might have been chosen on that particular line, and the same would be true of the others, none of which belonged to the LB&SCR. He would have to talk to their London and South Western Railway colleagues at Waterloo.
He rang Cumming with the bad news.
“Check with the ticket office there,” the Service chief told him. “See if anyone remembers Irishmen or Americans buying tickets to Ford this morning. I’ll get onto Waterloo and ring you back. You’d better give me that number.”
McColl did so, told the chief engineer he’d be back shortly, and took his railway police helper down to the ticket office. None of the clerks remembered selling a Ford ticket to anyone that morning, let alone to a foreigner. “I think I sold one to an American last week,” one man said. “It might have been Ford. You know,” he added, screwing up his face in concentration, “I think it was. A young man with curly brown hair. He seemed nervous.”
Colm Hanley.
Back in the engineering office, McColl sat and watched as troops boarded one of the trains below, good-naturedly jostling one another as they funneled through the doors. He knew he wouldn’t be seeing Jed or Mac—they’d be given several weeks’ training before being shipped to the front. Some of these he was watching now would be dying long before that.
The telephone eventually rang. “It seems that Irishmen and Americans have been buying tickets to everywhere,” Cumming complained. “Guildford, Godalming, Southampton—you name
it. The railway people are drawing up a list of obvious targets, and the order’s gone out to check every bridge on the lines in question, but there are hundreds of the damn things. We can only hope that they’ve been predictable and chosen the longest bridges on the busiest lines.”
McColl told him about the tickets for Ford, those that had been bought and those that seemingly hadn’t.
Cumming thought for a moment. “It’s still the only location we have any evidence for. You’d better get down there. I’ll put the local police in the picture and get them to meet you.”
Despite the heavy military traffic, regular trains were still running, and a Portsmouth-via-Horsham was allegedly leaving in twenty minutes. McColl bought a newspaper and some food for the journey, prevailed on his railway police helper to authorize free passage with the guard, and settled into a first-class seat. Much to his surprise, the train left on time and was soon steaming out through Battersea’s tangle of bridges and lines.
Working his way through the newspaper, he realized that wishful thinking was already taking over from truth. The words in the headlines—“airships,” “mine laying,” “Belgium”—told their own story, but a long piece on how hard the British had worked for peace seemed pathetically self-righteous. Another article claimed that Americans were as supportive of the British cause as were Canadians. Some of them might be, McColl conceded, but he knew whose victory the Shamrock Saloon would be toasting.
There were twenty thousand Americans said to be stranded in London and another sixty thousand spread across Europe, and arrangements were being made for their repatriation. She would go back to New York, he thought.
Should he have put in a word for Colm Hanley? Some sort of plea for mercy—that was what she wanted. But how could he have justified it to someone like Cumming? On the grounds that it might persuade his former lover to give him another chance?
Who was he kidding?
He tried to focus on the business at hand. Four lines and four bridges were his best bet. Two men to each, all trained by the German explosives expert at some secluded location in the Irish countryside. Which was why no one had seen Tiernan or Colm through June and most of July.
Why were they doing it? That wasn’t hard to guess. They were doing the Germans an enormous favor and proving in the process that they could be taken seriously. Success would increase their chances of having the favor returned, in the form of German military support for their wars against England and Ulster.
He couldn’t fault the strategy or argue with their goal of Ireland for the Irish, minus an alien crown. Even Brady and Tiernan’s fondness for violence was largely irrelevant—there were enough men on his own side of the fence who suffered from that disease.
But job or not, by God he wanted to stop them. The bridges might blow with no one on them or go down with a crowded train—the latter would no doubt prove more disruptive. Those lives were worth saving, and so was Europe from German rule. There was no doubt who had started this war; the Austrians might have pulled the trigger, but only once Berlin had primed the gun. Belgium’s neutrality was irrelevant—it wasn’t the Germans’ strategy he objected to but their reason for going to war. Which was national aggrandizement, pure and simple. They were not defending themselves, not seeking to spread civilization or democracy. It was only a ruler’s restless greed and an officer corps with something to prove. At everyone’s else’s expense.
An Irish republic might be a laudable goal, but not if the price were a German Europe.
They were beyond Croydon now and leaving London behind. It was another beautiful summer’s day, the parched meadows bearing testimony to weeks of sunshine. A day for picnics, not marching to war. He knew why Jed had done it, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept. He wondered if he’d ever see his brother again. Or, her.
He spent most of the rest of the journey going over their conversation that morning, hearing the awful coldness in her voice, the phrases echoing in his head, like lines from some ghastly music-hall piece. Nothing lasted forever, he told himself, but some things felt as if they were meant to.
The first sight of Arundel Castle, on a slope overlooking the valley, seemed positively medieval, and it was only a few seconds later, when the town beyond came into view, that the modern world reasserted itself. When the train stopped in Arundel station, he leaned out the window, half expecting that the passengers would all be ordered off. But the green flag fluttered, and the engine chuffed into motion once more. Clearly the Arun Bridge was still standing.
They were probably waiting for darkness. Which might explain the lack of tickets sold to Ford, he realized. There was nowhere there to wait unobserved, so they had bought their tickets to the station before or after and were planning to walk to their target once the sun had gone down.
A sound theory, but he still felt a pang of apprehension as the train rounded the curve to join the Brighton line and rumbled across the bridge. Rather to his surprise, there was no sign of anyone guarding the structure.
Alighting at Ford, he found a waiting deputation of six, comprising one middle-aged police sergeant, three young constables, and two young soldiers. The sergeant was carrying what looked like a Crimean War pistol in a service holster; the two soldiers—both of whom looked about sixteen—had Lee-Enfield rifles. The constables—one of whom looked even younger—had only truncheons.
The welcome was less than inspiring, as was the news that the bridge was untended. The six had been gathered and told to wait for “a government man from London,” but no one had thought to tell them why.
McColl took the sergeant aside and explained the situation
as simply as he could. “So we must occupy the bridge,” he concluded, “and wait for the enemy there.”
“Germans, is it?” the sergeant asked.
“Irish,” McColl told him. It didn’t seem worth complicating the story by introducing an American element.
The sergeant was not surprised. “Never did like them,” he said gruffly.
One happy family, the British, McColl thought as he led the party down the side of the tracks. Away to the north, Arundel Castle stood above the town; behind them as they walked, a red sun was sinking toward the horizon. It would be fully dark in an hour.
It was only a five-minute walk to the end of the bridge, but two trains passed by in that time, one thundering north around the curve toward Arundel, the other chugging slowly in the opposite direction, with the obvious intention of stopping at Ford. The central span of the bridge was retractable, but there was no sign of any shipping or of anyone there to do the retracting. A relic of the past, McColl decided, when cargo ships were small enough to use the river.
There was a signal box on the far side, which presumably controlled the junction, and some empty skiffs tied up a hundred yards downstream. McColl drew the sergeant aside again and suggested that he lead one soldier and one of his constables across the bridge, checking as they went for any sign of explosives. He should tell the signalman what was up before taking up position with the other two on that side of the river. “I’m going to ask your other two constables to get into one of those skiffs and have a look under the bridge,” he added.
The sergeant accepted his suggestions without objection and led his two charges out onto the structure. McColl thought it unlikely that the saboteurs would approach from the far side—there seemed nothing but open meadows beyond—but he couldn’t afford to leave it unguarded. He wondered if he should
have cautioned the others against opening fire with explosives in the vicinity and decided not. Dynamite would only do real damage if properly placed and fixed—unless, of course, they had a truly prodigious amount. He should have asked.
His constables were rowing their way toward the bridge against the sluggish current. When they reached it, one used his oars to keep them in place while the other stared up into the web of girders. After a minute or so, he turned to McColl and shook his head. Nothing untoward was attached.
By the time the two men got back, the sun was below the horizon. One crossed the tracks to join McColl while his younger partner remained with the soldier on the opposite side. As the minutes lengthened and the sky darkened, McColl could hear the young constable enthusing about the war and asking the soldier which service he most recommended. The answer, though inaudible, sounded less than enthusiastic, but whatever it was, it failed to deter. The young policeman burbled on, sounding louder and louder as the darkness deepened, until McColl told him to keep it down. McColl was dying for a cigarette but couldn’t take the risk of betraying their presence.