Robert took the first coach of the morning out of Dover, which dropped him at Dartford in the early afternoon. It was the final stop before London, and the coach was running twenty minutes late, so the guard was impatient about unloading the box and annoyed because water was dripping from it. Robert told him sharply not to jolt it and took it from him. When he opened the box in a quiet corner of the courtyard, he saw there was very little ice left. He’d managed to buy a few scoops of ice in Dover but the day was hot and he’d felt the sun drilling down on the coach as he tried not to wince at every jolt in the road. Inside the inn, he arranged with the landlord to keep the box in an outhouse and stowed it away himself, to wait until called for. He ordered cutlets and a pint of beer for lunch. He couldn’t remember when he’d last eaten or what and he wasn’t hungry now, but he was about to start on the last stage of the journey and the headlong rush that had brought him all the way across Europe now had to give place to something slower and more intricate. As he sat down and ate a few mouthfuls of meat, his body and most of his mind were still full of the need to rush on, waste no time, get back to England at all costs. He made himself think calmly, going over the plans he’d made on the journey again. He was expected to deliver the contents of the box to an address in Chelsea. When it was received, Liberty would be released. That was what he’d been told in an anonymous letter, but of course it was a lie. When he delivered the box, they’d kill him. That was obvious. What point would there be in letting him live? Equally clearly, they’d kill Liberty too, if they hadn’t done so already. When he let himself think of that, any attempt at calm became a grey waste where nothing mattered, where he might as well deliver the box and let events take their course. Even the thought that other people would die as well didn’t seem very important in comparison. The idea came to him that if he knew for sure that she was dead, he could at least do something to save those theoretical others. In handing over the box, he could actually cause the thing that he’d been trying to avoid on the journey and let the contents of it do what they were meant to do. It was, he supposed, what she might have wanted. But for the present, he must assume that she was still alive and use the only card he held in trying to free her. The other decision to make was whether to try to let anybody know where he was going. He’d been told in no uncertain terms not to, but when it came to it he couldn’t give up the hope that something might happen to save him from the final decision. The image of steady, trustworthy Amos came to him. He found a piece of grubby paper and a stub of a pencil in his pockets, scribbled a few words and addressed them to the livery stables. If the chance came to send it, all well and good. If not, it would probably make no difference anyway.
He left a handful of coins on the table and stood up to go into the yard. At the doorway, one of the inn servants came up to him.
‘You Mr Carmichael?’
He nodded and the servant pushed a piece of folded paper into his hand. His heart somersaulted as he opened it and saw the writing. I’m still alive, but only because you’ve done as instructed. Continue to obey instructions or you may never see me again. He found he’d grabbed the servant’s sleeve and was holding on to it.
‘Who gave you this?’
‘Gentleman left it this morning. Didn’t see him myself.’
He released the sleeve and the servant went away. He reread it. The paper was criss-crossed with several folds, splattered with tiny drops of ink, as if from a bad pen. The first reaction, that she was alive at least, drained away when he saw it wasn’t dated. For all he knew, it could have been written at the same time as the earlier message. He took the next coach into London, only able to afford a place on the outside. He’d taken a sizeable amount of money out of England with him – half his savings – and now it was almost gone. No matter. The coach was held up in the middle of London Bridge by the weight of traffic and he looked up the river at the dozens of ships coming in with the tide, the dome of St Paul’s, the brick-and-stone fronts of warehouses, offices, homes and everywhere tides of people, hurrying, loitering, strolling or just standing and watching, all presumably with lives that made sense to them. He was aware of the heat of the sun and the usual awful smell from the river, but distantly, as if they were all in a different world with a great pane of glass between him and everything else. He assumed it was probably tiredness, but that didn’t matter as long as he could keep his head clear. The coach journey ended at Holborn and he decided to walk from there, doubtful if he had enough money for a cab all the way out to Chelsea. He gave the note to the first reasonably sober-looking crossing sweeper he saw, along with his last half sovereign to deliver it. He kept mostly close to the river, not wanting to go anywhere near Mayfair and home. Wherever she was, she wouldn’t be there. Along Millbank, he crossed the road to avoid the building site, and went on past the prison and Vauxhall Bridge on the long stretch to Chelsea, with fewer people and vehicles now, and more trees. He was sweating in the heat. He couldn’t remember when he’d last washed, and the beard that he’d grown to save time shaving was prickling and itching. At Chelsea Hospital, a trim pensioner in his red tunic looked disapproving when he stopped to ask for directions, probably expecting him to beg for a copper or two. The address was simply the name of a public house, the Compass. It stood in a street of newish brick houses not far from the river, and looked as ordinary as a hundred other London public houses, neither especially old nor especially new, not quite rundown but not so well-kept either. Its outside was red brick, like the houses, with stone facings at the corners that might have been white once but were now grey from soot. A round board marked like a compass, paint slightly faded, hung above the closed front door. Robert opened it and stepped into an empty parlour, smelling of stale beer. Curtains were drawn halfway across the windows, and it seemed almost dark after the sun outside. A few heavy wooden tables with chairs drawn up round them were the only furniture, apart from a counter with barrels behind it facing a fireplace, its grate filled with large stone pebbles. A narrow staircase went up from an opening beside the fireplace. He stood in the middle of the room and called.
‘Is there anybody here?’
Silence, then a movement above his head, the floor creaking, then footsteps coming slowly downstairs. A woman stepped into the room – tall, broad-shouldered and unsmiling. Her dress was black and her thin hair was scraped back from her prominent forehead.
‘We’re not open.’
‘I was told to ask for John Smith.’
Her expression changed, though he couldn’t have said quite how. She still looked grim, but the obviously false name meant something to her. Without another word, she turned and went back upstairs. Almost immediately, different steps sounded on the stairs. A youngish man in a black jacket and open-necked flannel shirt, without a hat, passed through the room without glancing at Robert and went out of the front door. The woman followed him down.
‘He’s being sent for. You can wait.’ Then she went back upstairs.
He sat in a chair at one of the tables and waited for nearly two hours. Flies buzzed in the window. A cart went juddering past on the potholed road outside. Children’s voices sounded from a long way off. The sun was low enough to throw an orange rectangle through a gap in the curtains on to the wall before the door opened and two men came in. One was the messenger, the other a middle-aged man of medium height, pot-bellied, clean-shaven and round-faced, wearing a long grey jacket, black trousers and a low-crowned hat. His eyes were dark, protruding a little and also round. The rotundities of belly, face and eyes might have given him a soft look but there was nothing soft in the stare he was giving Robert. It wasn’t hostile exactly, but seemed to be sucking in every detail of his face and travel-stained clothes. He sat down opposite Robert at the table.
‘You’ve taken your time.’
His voice was a Londoner’s, quite educated, the comment sounding no more than a mild criticism. The round eyes were taking things in but letting nothing out. Robert stared into them but it was like looking at wet slate. He was tempted to defend himself and say truthfully that not a minute he could help had been wasted, but resisted. Let the other man talk.
‘Where is it?’
‘Where is she?’
The two questions hung in the air for what seemed like a long time. The messenger, standing by the door, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The pot-bellied man broke the silence.
‘She’s safe.’
‘Can I see her?’
‘When you deliver it to us. Have you got it here?’
Robert shook his head. ‘That would mean trusting you. I want to see her released first.’
‘And that would mean trusting you.’
Another silence. Robert kept his eyes fixed on the other man, hoping they’d give as little away as the man’s, and stated his terms. ‘I want to see her released first. I don’t even need to talk to her and she doesn’t have to know I’m watching. Once it happens, I’ll tell you where it is.’
The man moved his head slowly from side to side, still expressionless.
‘It’s the only way you’ll get it,’ Robert said.
At last, an expression. The man’s lips curved into a smile that was worse than the blankness. It faded quickly. He looked towards the messenger and gave him a nod. The man went out of the front door and returned almost immediately. Just behind him was another man, entirely unremarkable, from the grey cap over his mid-brown hair to his worn black boots, his face round and pale, his eyes nondescript. Nothing would have picked him out in the crowd or even in the bustle of a Dartford coaching yard, where most of Robert’s attention had been concentrated on unloading the box. And yet, as soon as Robert set eyes on him, he jerked upright in his seat, knowing that was where he’d last seen the man only a few hours ago. Before that, too, in the coaching yard in Dover, he’d seen a man who’d looked very like him, but why notice that particular man in the hurry to get on the London coach? There were half a dozen like him anywhere people gathered. Of course, they’d have had a man at Dover, waiting for him. He should have expected it, and perhaps would have expected it if he hadn’t been so intent on getting to his journey’s end. The unremarkable man was carrying something. The box, dripping moisture on to the floor in heavy drops. At a nod from the pot-bellied man, he set it down on a table, heavily. As soon as he saw it, Robert knew that the game had changed. He tried to rebound from the shock and make his mind work faster than it had ever worked before. His first reaction was to call out a warning that they should treat it carefully, but he suppressed it and looked away from the box, back towards the pot-bellied man. He thought, They’ve got it now, so they can kill Liberty and me, if they haven’t killed her already. He was calculating that if he got up from the chair he could stride across the room and aim a kick at the table that would dislodge the box and blow them all sky-high. Even if the messenger and the nondescript man tried to grab him, there’d be a struggle that would surely have the same effect. As he thought about it, he tried to keep completely still, so that Pot-belly wouldn’t guess what was in his mind. The woman upstairs would die too, but she was part of it. The knowledge that the decisive next move could be his made his mind clear. He could do it at any time. Even if they closed in to kill him, he could make enough of a fight of it to do the job. Keep it in reserve, then. Assume that there was just the faintest chance, the merest sliver of a chance, that Liberty was still alive and play the game out.
‘There are two things Professor Sobrero told me that you need to know before you start handling it,’ he said. ‘It’s dangerously unstable. A shock can set it off.’ He was surprised at how cool his voice sounded, and amused when the messenger and the nondescript man stepped smartly sideways, away from the table. The one thing in his favour might be their ignorance and fear. He knew precious little about the properties of pyroglycerine, but he’d have to gamble that they knew less.
‘And the other?’ Pot-belly asked.
‘It’s to do with precautions when you handle it. I want to see Liberty released before I tell you.’
For the first time, he saw a flicker of doubt in the round eyes. Pot-belly and the other two might try to beat the information out of him, but what if he lied to them? They needed his help, as men faced with a bad-tempered tiger needed an animal trainer. For some time, nobody said anything, then Pot-belly glanced at the messenger.
‘Lock him up.’
Robert didn’t resist when they took him down to the cellar and bolted the trap door over him. He sat on the floor with his back against the damp wall and heard the front door of the house open and close. Pot-belly was going for more instructions, he thought. So he wasn’t the leader in whatever was happening, only a lieutenant. It was something to have put even a kink in their plans, but it would help if he had any idea what those plans were. In the meantime, all he could do was wait.