All Honourable Men

19

Throughout the afternoon the sky had crowded with clouds, the sea became flecked with white and the wind started to make serious sounds in the rigging. By his last sight of the sun, Ranklin reckoned the Captain had turned away from the coast and islands to give himself more room for mistakes; he thoroughly approved.

In the saloon the steward had put away all the bottles and glasses and was making sure the tables and chairs were tied to ring-bolts in the floor. But he had issued Lady Kelso with a wide-based mug of coffee and offered to fetch another. Ranklin said he’d wait until the tying-down was finished and, picking his moment in the ship’s roll, dropped into a chair.

“No sign of Dr Streibl?” he enquired.

“I’m afraid the poor man’s confined himself to quarters.”

“But not you.”

“I’ve got quite a strong stomach. I should have, after twenty years of eating Bedouin food and getting around on camels.” The steward had disappeared towards the galley and she seemed about to say something.

Ranklin beat her to it: “I was a bit surprised you say that Miskal Bey’s a mountain Arab. I mean, I think of Arabs as desert types, you know.”

“ ‘Arab’ is just a race – like English, and at least as varied. You get as many mountain Arabs as desert ones – and most live in towns, anyway: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut . . . It was the Arabs who founded the Islamic Empire and they don’t forget it. The Ottoman Turks are Johnny-come-latelies who were hired as mercenary soldiers. Then, over time, the wheel turned.” She smiled ruefully.

The steward came back with Ranklin’s mug of coffee. Then, just as Lady Kelso was about to get onto the topic of her choice, one of the ship’s officers came in from the deck, accompanied by a howl from the weather until he slammed the door on it. He saluted quickly and steadied himself on the back of a chair, dripping water from his sou’wester all over it.

“Please: there is much storm . . . the Herr Kapitan asks you do not go on the outside, the deck – Yes?”

“Thank you,” Lady Kelso purred.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Ranklin said.

The officer saluted again and handed his way out, letting in another brief howl from the storm.

The steward had gone and this time Ranklin had to let her have her say. “Actually, this wouldn’t be a bad time to go looking for that gold coin. Nobody’ll expect you to be on deck, nobody else’ll be, the Captain’s sure to be on the bridge and I think it’s in his office cabin sort of thing, it’s marked Buro towards the front on-”

“I saw it, too.”

“Good. There’s a safe inside-”

“You looked?”

Again the sweet smile. “Oh, nobody minds a woman being snoopy, they expect us to do the most frightful things. Do you know anything about breaking into safes?”

“I say, hold on, wait just a minute . . . Do you really think we ought to be doing this . . . this sort of thing?”

“I think Sir Edward just sent me as a gesture of goodwill, but he assumed I’d fail. But he didn’t know about the ransom, did he? How could he have done? So it seems to me he’d expect us to spoil that, if we can. We’d really be doing what he originally wanted: helping delay the Railway.”

She’d probably convinced herself that was true, too. Or was thinking of riding into London society as the great patriotic heroine. Or both. Either way, he was left wondering who was supposed to be the spy on this damned mission. Here she was urging him to do something he was planning anyway. If he just said No, he could lose her as a potential ally; if he confessed who he really was, he was putting his life, the whole mission, in her hands. Perhaps he could play the deeply-shocked diplomatist but go ahead with the burglary anyway, without her knowing . . .

Not realising it, he must have pulled a deeply-shocked-diplomatist face because she said: “If you feel you really can’t, I’ll have a stab at it myself. I can probably talk my way out if I get caught.”

He really should stop being surprised how naturally women turned to blackmail. And whether she meant it or not, he had to let it work. “No, no,” he said gloomily, “I’ll have a go.”

“Oh, how splendid you are! It looks quite an old safe, and the Captain’s probably left the key or the combination in his desk drawer. I didn’t have time to look.”

“I’ll try when we’re through with dinner . . . What are you going to be doing?”

She’d got it all thought out. “Persuading everybody that you’re still around here. I thought the best way was for me to go into your cabin. If a steward or anybody hears my voice, they’ll assume you’re there, too.” This was delivered with yet another bright innocent smile. “Just chatting about England and the Season, of course.”

* * *

Corinna found O’Gilroy planted at the big table in the middle of the Vanadis’s saloon, where the almost imperceptible roll of the vessel would be at its least. She had been prowling the yacht – the first chance she’d had – and comparing it with her father’s Kachina. But all yachts had much the same layout: that was inevitable once you’d put the engine and boiler rooms where they had to be, and the officers’ cabins within easy reach of the bridge. This was bigger and more powerful than Kachina but coal-fired, which meant a lot of cleaning whenever they coaled, and the decor was too conventional for her taste. Her father had let her decorate Kachina in light woods and subtly cheerful colours – except for his “study”, which was the usual Banker’s Spanish Main, and his bedroom. He could pick the decor in which he entertained his lady friends for his own damned self.

O’Gilroy pushed the paper he had been writing on aside and staggered to his feet. She waved him back. “I got the wireless operator to send a message to the British Embassy saying you’d been found safe and would they tell the Honourable Snaipe you’ll try to catch up – if they know where he is.”

“Thank ye. I reckon the Captain’d be worrying.”

“I also learnt that the German Embassy yacht, the Loreley, left Constantinople yesterday afternoon going full steam. And today the wireless operator picked her up in the Aegean morsing for weather information, which means she’s going the same way that we are. So probably Matt and Lady Kelso and your German chums are aboard her.”

O’Gilroy was surprised. “Them on a boat, too? . . . What’s that mean, then?”

“That they won’t reach the south coast, a place called Mersina – where we’re going – until the day after tomorrow. But our Captain also reckons we’re about four knots faster, and if they run into a storm – it seems there’s one down past Smyrna – and have to slow down, we should catch up quite a bit.”

“Are we heading for a storm, then?”

Corinna had forgotten how resolutely bad a sailor O’Gilroy was. How he had ever managed to get off Ireland . . . Lying flat and groaning, presumably. “We shouldn’t be; he says it’ll have blown inland by the time we get there. Just a bit of a sea.”

He looked at her with dark suspicion. “Worse’n this?”

They were in a near-flat calm in the almost land-locked Sea of Marmora. “This is nothing. This is normal.” Then she curbed her impatience and tried a bit of distraction: “Apart from nearly shooting each other’s heads off – with my pistol – did you learn anything from your buddies at the station?”

“Mebbe . . .” O’Gilroy had been trying to work out what he had learnt, or come to suspect. But this was usually Ranklin’s job; O’Gilroy contributed mistrust and muscle, and neither was much help here. He needed a fluent mind to help interpret and while Corinna certainly had that, she was still a foreigner. Tied up with the French, too, who seemed to be playing an unexpected part . . .

He’d try to advance step by step. “D’ye recall a feller Gunther van der Brock? Was using another name when ye met him-”

“Of course I remember him. That was the first time I ever had to use my pistol. I ought to charge the Secret Service whenever-”

“Sure, sure . . . Two weeks back, Gunther got himself killed in London. No, ’twasn’t us. Only his partners – the fellers at the station – they reckon ’twas our fault. He’d come over to sell us the . . . the story ’bout the Railway. So the Captain reckons.”

She sat down. “All that about the kidnapped engineers? – it’s been in the papers, everybody knows it. And Lady Kelso’s mission, everyone knows that by now, too.”

“Surely . . .” But they didn’t know about the ransom. And neither did she, it seemed. “. . . only, what’s Bertie doing, getting mixed up in it, going off down there to . . . to where it all is?”

She shrugged. “Bertie knows the Arabs – so everyone says. And the old bandit chief down there’s more or less an Arab, isn’t he? Perhaps Bertie put him up to the whole thing in the first place.”

O’Gilroy sat very still. Then he murmured: “Jayzus ’n Mary,” reverentially. He reached for his sheet of paper and began writing.

Corinna watched, amused. She couldn’t see what he was writing, just that it was done in a laborious but near-perfect copperplate script. Only the educated classes, who used writing as an everyday tool, scrawled unreadably.

But O’Gilroy’s runaway thoughts were outpacing his careful script. All sorts of things fell into place if he assumed Bertie had manipulated Miskal. Like where Miskal had got his repeating rifles from. And as for the ransom, it was no longer a question of whether Bertie knew about it, but whether demanding it had been his idea all along. And then – it was coming with a rush now – if Bertie and his bosses had actually created that “secret”, Gunther could have got it from them, not the Germans. And the French, suspicious, then had Gunther killed. Certainly Bertie had been far more suspicious of them than anyone on the train.

Only . . . if he was trying to delay the Railway, he wouldn’t want the ransom to work, would he? There was still something missing. His ambition to hit Monsieur Lacan with a blunt axe still held, but perhaps he’d allow himself a couple of questions first.

Corinna asked sweetly: “Do I get to mark your homework?”

“Mebbe . . . when I know ye’ll give it ten out of ten.” In fact, he planned to throw it into the sea . . . Oh, God, why had he remembered the heaving, churning sea?

* * *

Ranklin had no sou’wester, not even a rain-proof, so he just buttoned his overcoat to the neck. He decided against any sort of hat – it might blow off and be found on deck – and, after a little thought, shoes and socks as well. Weren’t bare feet traditional for gripping a stormy deck? The bag of lead shot (which Lady Kelso didn’t know about), a handkerchief to dry his hands and a dry-battery torch and he was ready to go safecracking.

She knocked and came quickly into his cabin. “I told the steward we were both getting an early night and didn’t want to be disturbed. And I listened at Dr Streibl’s door and he’s moaning louder than the wind, so I think we’re safe from him. Good luck.”

Ranklin took the companion-way that led to the outside world rather than go through the saloon. The door onto the deck wasn’t locked – presumably in case they had to abandon ship – and he stood outside it for a moment, rain lashing into his face like dust-shot, hoping his eyes would adjust to the darkness. They didn’t much; a stormy night at sea is a very dark place, and a wet, noisy and wallowing one as well. The Loreley didn’t just roll, she also wanted to put her nose down and whuffle along like a badger. There were long shuddering spells when he guessed the propeller had come clear out of the water.

But when he started moving forward, at least there was a rail along the deck-house wall to grip. He worked along it towards the distant light of the bridge, step by step, hand by hand.

The door of the Captain’s Buro was unlocked, just as Ranklin had hoped and expected. Locks and bolts were civilian concepts: a senior officer’s cabin was sacred. He pulled the door shut behind him and kept gripping the knob as a hand-hold against the wandering floor.

It was even darker in here, he’d certainly need the torch. But the cabin had windows onto the main deck and roving half-shaded torch-light would look far more suspicious than drawn curtains, so after one flash to locate himself, he staggered about in the darkness pulling them shut. Then he sat in the desk chair, which was bolted to the floor, and played the torch around.

Apart from being the Captain’s office, it must be his sea cabin – where he dossed down for an hour or two between storms – because it had a bunk along one wall and a clothes cupboard next to it. That just about left room for the desk, chair and the safe. It was about twice as big as the one on the train and spattered with old-fashioned brass trimmings, and perhaps a professional safe-cracker would have rubbed his hands with glee – if he could have got on board a naval vessel to begin with.

Ranklin seated himself on the floor in front of it, peered at the dial – a normal numerical one – and then dug in his pocket for his diary. It had two months’ of fiction about Snaipe’s dinner engagements and dentist’s appointments, and at the back some figures posing as expenses, bets and train times. He began decoding.

“First crack the owner of the safe,” Mr Peters the locksmith had advised, and Ranklin had come as prepared as he could. So the first number to try was the Kaiser’s birthday: 27-01-59. He spun the knob two full turns anticlockwise, then onto 27. A full turn clockwise and onto 01. Then 59. If that had been right, he should have heard a small bar falling into place along the three notches on the now-aligned discs. He didn’t, but there was plenty of noise from the ship and the sea, so he tugged at the handle anyway. Still nothing.

Start again with the Kaiser’s accession as King of Prussia: 15-06-88. Nothing.

Then the date the German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles: 18-01-71. More nothing, and he began to doubt the Captain’s patriotism.

So try his professionalism: Grossadmiral von Tirpitz’s birthday, 19-03-49.

He couldn’t remember what the remaining numbers were, though probably one was Admiral Prince Heinrich, the Kaiser’s brother. And none of them worked. Just for the hell of it he tried 10-20-30 and a few like it, in the faint hope it was still at the combination the makers had set all those years ago, but somebody had gone to that small trouble.

He gave up and flashed the torch around. As Lady Kelso – and Mr Peters before her – had said, people could be stupid enough to scrawl the combination on the wall, even on the safe, but while a navy might have nothing against stupidity, it deplored such untidiness. Or they wrote it inside a desk drawer, so he returned to the chair and tried the drawers. They were locked, probably just to stop them falling out in the storm, yet he wasn’t skilled enough to pick even them: what chance did he stand with a safe?

Outside, the sea thundered and the wind shrieked in the rigging. Overhead, he heard the clump of booted feet on the bridge and the occasional ting of the engine-room telegraph – reassuring sounds, for as long as they were there, they weren’t catching him here. But it didn’t advance his cause.

Nor did the photograph of, presumably, the Captain’s wife on the wall. Ranklin caculated that if the combination were her birthday and he could guesss her age within five years, he’d have about 1800 combinations to try (even assuming the Captain remembered his wife’s birthday). He began a desultory search of the desk baskets and found plenty of figures, but all temporary ones: distances steamed, kilos of coal and other stores embarked, dates on letters and forms . . .

There was also a faded photograph of the Loreley itself when she had been launched in 1885 as the Mohican. There were a few figures in the caption, so he tried combinations of the gross and net tonnage – 53-63-64 and 36-45-36 and was left with the builders’ number 90061.

Putting a zero on the front meant dialling 00, which was impossible, so he added it at the end: 90-06??10. Click.

He didn’t believe it and the pull on the door was pure habit, but it opened and the torch shone on – paperwork. A mass of paperwork, and he couldn’t believe that, either. As in a trance, he pulled a heavy book free and saw it was the current German Navy code. A bulky sealed envelope turned out to be instructions in case of war. Increasingly desperate, he shuffled envelopes and pamphlets all stamped GEHEIM – secret. He stared numbly as the torchlight played over a spy’s treasure trove which he was totally unprepared to deal with. And not a single, solitary centime of gold in sight.

Automatically he shut the door and spun the dial to lock it, then sat back. Oh, he could see what had happened, all right. The noble military mind at work: the real treasure was codes and sealed orders, sorry, no room for mere gold, shove it in my socks drawer.

Well, had the bloody man shoved it in his socks drawer? Crawling as the safest way to move around, it took him under half a minute to find the four boxes in the bottom of the clothes cupboard under a collection of sea-boots.

The boxes were solidly built – they had to hold nearly a hundred pounds weight each without falling apart – but crude and unsealed apart from the nails. By now furious at the time and apprehension he’d wasted, he used his penknife to wrench one of the lids free. And there were ten bags of coin, each printed “Imperial Ottoman Bank”, each drawstring sealed with red wax, but hastily and variably. Some were barely sealed at all, and he lifted each bag in turn into the torchlight to pick those out. He got two, then took a second look at the others rather than open another box.

And that bag felt odd. He squeezed it again, feeling the tiny circles of coin, but those at the bottom seemed stuck together in a lump. Gold coins sticking together? That seemed unlikely. Holding it over the box, where fragments of sealing-wax might be expected, he picked the drawstring loose, opened the bag and felt down past the loose coins on top and brought up the lump. They were certainly glued together, but holding the lump closer to the torch he saw they were blank discs daubed with gold paint. Where the paint had scratched, dull grey metal showed through.

He sat back to think – but the first thought was that this was neither time nor place for thinking. He struck a match and re-sealed the wax, reloaded the box, finding other bags with lumps at the bottom – and then realised he had nothing to hammer the lid shut with except rubber boots. He took a big metal ashtray from the desk and used it to force the nails back by silent pressure.

Then he opened the curtains, took a last think around the dark cabin, and cautiously stepped out into the storm. Before he started working his way aft, he pitched his bag of shot into the sea.

“Nobody tried to come in,” Lady Kelso reported. She sounded a little disappointed. “How did you get on?” Then she realised how wet he was. “No, you go ahead and change, I’ll turn my back.”

Modesty wasn’t Ranklin’s main worry: it was the steward finding his damp clothes in the morning, since nothing would dry in that cabin overnight. Well, he’d think of something. He changed his trousers, dried his feet, and lit a cigarette.

Lady Kelso turned back. “Well?”

“I found it. It wasn’t even in the safe.” He frowned, trying to think one step ahead of what he was saying. But she had to know most of it: suppose she was with Miskal when the ransom was delivered and he got furious at all treacherous Europeans? She wasn’t planned to be there then, but this of all plans wasn’t going to go to . . . well, to plan.

“And?” she prompted.

“Somebody’s salted the sugar already: some of the bags have got discs of lead in at the bottom, stuck together so they won’t spill out if you just checked the coins at the top. So I left them as they were.”

“Dahlmann?”

“No. It would be cutting his own throat. Most of the coins are real, so he’d still be paying a good ransom for guaranteed nothing . . . Unless he’s working to some ‘fiendish plan’, and he doesn’t seem a man to believe in fiendish plans.”

She was looking calm but curious. “Then who d’you think it was?”

“I think it all happened at the Imperial Ottoman Bank. Not by them, but there. I saw Dahlmann check the coins – dammit, I signed that I’d witnessed that. . . Then we watched the coins being bagged and sealed and nailed into boxes . . . Then I went off to change some sovereigns.” And he’d rejoined the party as they were waiting for the last box to be brought up from the vaults – so Dahlmann couldn’t have been watching all four boxes all the time. “They switched a whole box. At least one.”

“Yes, but who?”

Hardly D’Erlon, it was his – one of his – banks’ reputation. So who had muddied the waters by asking a British diplomatist and an American bankeress along to sign that the whole thing had been above-board? – and been careful not to be there himself? “Did you meet a chap they call Beirut Bertie at the Embassy dinner?”

“D’you think it was him? Yes, I met him. We had a long chat about the Bedouin, he knows the tribes very well. He seems to be very much on their side.”

“That’s what everybody says. So perhaps nobody thinks he might be working at his real job on the French side.”

“Could he have arranged it?”

“If you’ve been around these parts as long as he has – it must be thirty years – and worked for the Imp Ott at one time, I fancy you could arrange anything.” Provided, of course, that you knew well in advance what the money was wanted for.

“But aren’t the French supposed to be our allies nowadays?”

“Yes, but are we acting like their allies? On the face of it, we’re helping the Germans get the Railway restarted, aren’t we?”

“I suppose so,” she said in a small voice.

Ranklin shook his head wearily. “Everybody’s cooking to their own recipe on this one: Germans, French, ourselves, Zurga’s faction of the Turkish Government. God knows what it’s all going to taste like.” He roused himself: “Look: this may give you an extra card. If we get into Miskal’s stronghold and you’re still there when the ransom looks like arriving, you can warn him in advance that he’s being cheated. Just so he doesn’t get angry with you.”

“Thank you.” She cocked her head on one side; if she’d had her fan she would have waved it slowly. “When I first met you, I thought you were a bit of a fool. Now . . .”

Ranklin groaned to himself; he’d let the Snaipe mask slip. He rammed it back in place. “Oh, well, you know . . . I mean-”

“Yes, saying things like that.”

“It doesn’t do in the Diplomatic to seem too bright.”

“It doesn’t do to be too bright. Remember, I was married to one once. Good night, Mr Snaipe.”