Ratcatcher

taking Hawkwood on to the submersible. The woman, clearly, had not harboured the same degree of reservation. She had killed the clockmaker and left his corpse displayed for all to see.

It had been James Read who had suggested the motive behind her actions.

“I suspect the lady knew that Mandrake’s premises would be compromised anyway and that your presence there was not a random event. She probably felt that, with you in Lee’s hands, her mission was, to all intents and purposes, complete. Having Master Woodburn under her feet would hamper her movements, possibly hinder an escape. No, by her reasoning, Master Woodburn had become an inconvenience, something to be discarded at the earliest opportunity.”

The Chief Magistrate’s words made sense, terrible though they were. It came to Hawkwood then, the awful truth. The message that had been in the clockmaker’s eyes when he had boarded the submersible. It had been the moment when Josiah Woodburn had known that he, too, was under sentence of death. With Hawkwood dead, the old man was the only other witness to Mandrake’s treachery.

In an uncharacteristic gesture, James Read placed his hand on Hawkwood’s arm. “Do not reproach yourself. There was little you could have done.”

“I left him to die,” Hawkwood said.

“I suspect Master Woodburn knew you had no choice.” The Chief Magistrate sighed. “Our clockmaker was a very courageous gentleman.”

Hawkwood’s shock at the murder and the ease with which he had been duped had fuelled a rage and a grim determination to bring all those responsible to account, especially the woman.

It was with a leaden sense of guilt that he had raised himself from his sick bed and retraced his path to the house on the Strand. There had been no requirement for him to make the journey. James Read had already taken it upon himself to relay the news of Josiah Woodburn’s murder to the staff. The Chief Magistrate had not wanted to entrust the onerous responsibility to a subordinate. Hawkwood, however, had felt he owed it to the old man to pay his own respects. The knowledge that he had been unable to protect the clockmaker from a senseless act of brutality lay like a heavy weight upon his conscience and it wasn’t the Hobbs he dreaded facing, it was the old man’s granddaughter. He wondered if he would be able to look her in the eye without flinching.

The Hobbs had admitted Hawkwood to the house with the loss etched deeply into their worn faces, and he knew the moment he stepped over the threshold that the little girl was not there. The silence told him so, and he wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not.

“She’s with her aunt’s family in Sussex,” Mrs Hobbs told him. “Her uncle is a vicar. He has a small parish outside Rottingdean. They have a daughter of their own, the same age as Elizabeth. It was thought the right thing to do, while the family puts the master’s affairs in order.” The housekeeper’s face was as grey and drawn as her husband’s. “A terrible business, Officer Hawkwood, a terrible business. The people who did this will be punished, won’t they?”

“Yes,” Hawkwood had promised them. “If I have anything to do with it.”

At least that’s what he had assumed.

“She’s to be exchanged,” James Read said.

“What?”

“She’s Bonaparte’s most valued agent in Britain. We can use that to our advantage. It’s our intention to exchange her for British agents held in France. Overtures have been made. The French will release five of our men in exchange for her safe passage back to Calais. It’s an excellent trade.”

The Chief Magistrate’s face softened. “I know what you’re thinking, Hawkwood. We’re at war and many good men have died: the coachman, Officer Warlock, Master Woodburn…But there is a higher agenda at stake here. If this conflict is to be resolved, accommodations must be made, diplomatic channels must remain open. That agenda was severely compromised when Bonaparte commissioned Lee to attack Thetis. A line was crossed. A precedent set. That was why we had no compunction in placing French prisoners on board the ship. An eye for an eye, if you will. But I believe it was an aberration and the arrest of the woman has given us an opportunity to step back from the abyss. The situation is recoverable. With an exchange such as this, each side can be assured that dialogue is still an option. It is sensible, Hawkwood. Above all, it is civilized.”

Hawkwood tried to find words, but none were forthcoming. He wondered about the Chief Magistrate’s use of the word civilized. Had it been civilized, he wondered, to sacrifice the French prisoners or the imbecile Eli Gant? This was a side to James Read that was new to him. Beneath the Chief Magistrate’s cultured exterior, there existed a ruthlessness that would have done justice to some of the guerrilleros that Hawkwood had fought with in the Spanish mountains.

In the defence of the realm, it was now clear that any rule could be broken. All methods could be justified in the pursuit of a goal. Then Hawkwood remembered the unfinished conversation in the bedroom at the commissioner’s house and knew instinctively there was more to follow.

“We knew from Lieutenant Ramillies’ reports that improvements had been made to the submersible boat.” It was Colonel Congreve who spoke. The colonel had stopped pacing and was standing next to the fireplace. “We needed to find out what they were and whether they had made the device a more viable proposition. William Lee’s mission to attack Thetis gave us that opportunity. It meant we could observe the efficiency of the vessel first hand.”

“What if I’d been able to destroy it?” Hawkwood asked.

“We still had the drawings the clockmaker gave to Officer Warlock. Those and the intelligence gleaned by Lieutenant Ramillies in France would have provided us with a basis for our own plans.”

“Own plans for what?” Hawkwood said. Though he had begun to suspect what they might be.

“To build our own submersible boat, of course.”

Hawkwood felt a swirl of nausea.

“And I have to confess,” the colonel beamed, “we were damned impressed with the result. Tell me, is it true Lee had constructed a means by which you can see above the water when the vessel’s submerged?”

“He called it the eye,” Hawkwood said woodenly, wondering what madness was about to be unleashed.

“Splendid!” the colonel beamed. “I look forward to examining it in detail.”

Hawkwood stared at him.

“Well, you didn’t think we were going to leave the damned thing on the bottom of the river, did you?”

“That thing,” Hawkwood said, “is a bloody death-trap. It blew up.”

“That’s right.” Congreve nodded. There was a pause. “It was supposed to.”

James Read ignored the look of bewilderment on Hawkwood’s face. “Master Woodburn made it happen. When we retrieved his body from the warehouse, we also discovered his journal. He had been composing it in secret, using scraps of paper he managed to secrete during his incarceration. He describes the repairs he was forced to make to the submarine bomb’s timing device. He also describes his own sabotage attempt. It seems he used to let himself out of his cell at night. His guard, Seaman Sparrow, had a habit of leaving the premises to frequent the local gin shop. He obviously thought the old man was securely locked up. Master Woodburn took advantage of his jailer’s absence to make his own modifications to the submersible. Apparently, he was able to conceal a small amount of explosive and equipment to fashion a bomb of his own. Triggered by a clockwork mechanism, it seems, set in motion and timed to detonate once the torpedo had been released from the submersible’s stern.”

Hawkwood recalled the old man’s manner in the cell. Josiah Woodburn had been about to tell him something when Lee had walked in with the woman. Presumably it was the other reason why he hadn’t escaped with Warlock. It hadn’t only been fear for his granddaughter’s safety that had held the clockmaker back, but also his plan to turn the tables on William Lee’s assassination plot. Again, there had been the expression on the old man’s face as Hawkwood had boarded the submersible. Not only the knowledge that his own life had become forfeit but that Hawkwood was being forced on to what was, in effect, a doomed vessel.

“You’re planning to salvage the submersible?” Hawkwood said, still not believing it.

Congreve nodded. “That’s right. And we’ve got our own man to operate it.”

And it all began to fall into place. “Captain Johnstone.”

“Correct. The man’s an indisputable rogue, of course. Talented, I grant you, but a rogue nonetheless. He worked with Fulton when he brought the Nautilus to England. A jack of all trades, you might call him. Been a Channel pilot, privateer, smuggler, even spent a time or two in a debtors’ prison. Not the sort of fellow you’d invite to a soiree, but he’s the best man for the job. No doubt about that.”