“Sir? Is everything all right, sir?” Gairden said, getting to his feet.
Rheese waved him back down, gulped brandy and tugged at his collar. “Yes, yes.”
Gairden glanced at his watch. “It seems your clock is out of time, sir.”
Rheese glared at the clock. “So it is. What’s the use of a clock that doesn’t tell the right time, I ask you?” he said. “Or any machine that refuses to work. Not a bit of use. That’s what.”
“Sir?”
“Sorry, Inspector. It’s been a trying day.”
The clock sat on a small ornate table draped with a fringed, green velvet cloth, and something lay just beyond it, glimmering softly.
“Oh,” Rheese said, “she’s not working either. But I shall have her going, see if I don’t.”
Gairden peered. His eyes, bemused, sorted through the soft gleam of metal. The long sliver of shine, a leg; the rounded arch, a foot. Some sort of automaton, in polished brass, tumbled in the corner like a drunk. Or a corpse.
“Do you like automata, Inspector?” Rheese said, topping up his brandy.
“Not really my style of thing, sir.”
“People are wild for them; the more elaborate, the better. There’s a mechanical chamber orchestra that’s been all over the papers.”
“Oh, I may have seen something, yes.”
“That’s what people like. But they’re clumsy, you know, the mannequins. The way they move . . . everyone’s trying for something more human. It’s not easy.”
“No, I don’t suppose it is. Now, Mr Rheese, do you have any idea who might have attacked Mr Wishart?”
“Well—”
“Sir?
“We make frivols, Inspector. Amusements. Toys. Toys are all innocence, you’d think, but there’s no harder business than this. Espionage goes on all the time. We take precautions, but someone could have got in, especially during the shift change, with a couple of hundred people going in and out.”
“You think Mr Wishart might have disturbed someone in the act of stealing his designs?”
Rheese swallowed the last of the brandy. “We’ve been doing very well. People notice.”
“Yes,” Inspector Gairden said. “And I understand that Mr Wishart was an exceptionally talented young man.”
“Hah. He was well enough, I suppose, but really, Inspector, he was a boy from the workhouse when all’s said and done. I was giving him what education I could, of course. Trying to make him useful, for m’ father’s sake.”
“Oh, I understood he was something like a genius,” Gairden said.
“If he’d been that, Inspector, don’t you think someone would have tried to bribe him away, rather than murder him?”
Gairden felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir. He turned his head, convinced someone had come into the room. But the door remained firmly shut. A death-rattle sound came from the clock, and a thick final
“There is that, of course, sir,” Gairden said. “If they’d known about him. Did he have many friends?”
“I don’t know, Inspector. Well, he would hardly have brought them here; this is a manufactory, not a club, what?”
“What about enemies?”
Rheese shrugged. “There’s the Children of Lud, of course. Wretched fellows.”
“The machine-breakers? Have you had trouble with them?”
“Not for some time, but they’re still about; well, you’d know, Inspector, wasn’t some fella arrested for it just the other week?”
“Not in my jurisdiction, sir. And I hadn’t heard of them going as far as murder.”
“It’s not a great leap, though, is it, Inspector, between attacking a man’s property and attacking his person, don’t you think?”
Gairden, who rather thought it was, chose not to answer. “Do you know if Mr Wishart had any problems with the other workers, sir?”
Rheese rubbed at his whiskers. “Not that I know of, but they will have their rows and jealousies, you know. My father gave him his own workshop, and so forth. I suppose not everyone likes to see a boy from the workhouse do well, eh? But Lassiter’d know better than I.”
“I’ll need to talk to them.”
A whistle blew, long and loud, cutting over the thud-thud-thud of the machines.
“Well, then, you’d be just in time to catch them coming off shift, if we go now. I’ll get Lassiter to gather them up.” He picked up the speaking tube that dangled from the wall by his desk, and removed the stopper. “Hello? Amabelle? Tell Lassiter to hold the workers back; the inspector needs to speak to them.” He stoppered the tube and got to his feet.
“So you kept them to their work, sir, once Mr Wishart was discovered?” Gairden asked.
“Couldn’t stop the machines, not for something like this.”
“No. Under what circumstances would the machines be stopped?”
“If there’s an accident, obviously, then. Oh, and when Her Majesty, bless her, passed on. All the manufactories stopped for an hour for the funeral.”
“Yes, I remember. Well, I needn’t keep you from your work, sir, if you’re happy to let me talk to them.”
“By all means. Yes, I must get on. I’ll be doing the boy’s work as well as my own, now.” For a moment his heavy face quivered with genuine emotion, though what precisely that emotion was, the Inspector couldn’t tell.
The workers, taken all together, were a pallid, weary collection, like nothing so much as dolls that had been left out in the rain by a careless child. There were a hundred and fifty of them; Gairden did what he could to narrow it down. Most, simply enough, had come in, gone to their machines and had not looked up except when they took their meal break; most ate in the refectory, where they now huddled. Several seemed upset; four or five women were sniffing and lending handkerchiefs, some of the men had their heads together, muttering. A few glanced longingly at the windows or gazed sullenly at the floor, showing nothing but a dull resentment at being kept past their time. The new shift were already at the benches; the machines thudded relentlessly on.
Gairden stood in front of them and coughed. “Ladies and gentlemen, I won’t keep you a moment. I’m sure you’ve all heard that Mr Wishart was killed this evening. We hope to find whoever did it as soon as possible. If any of you have seen anything, or noticed anything at all out of the way, however small, please come and tell me. I’ll be in the wages office for as long as I’m needed.” He’d dealt with factory workers, and factory owners, before, so he added; “If you’d rather not do it here, you may find me at the Thrall Street station. Just ask for Inspector Gairden.”
A low murmur rippled through them; a few looked at each other. No one stood.
Gairden made his way to the wages office; a solemn box of a place, its mahogany cupboards sternly locked. It rather put him in mind of an expensive coffin. Though a coffin, he thought, would probably be quieter.
There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Gairden said.
It was Lassiter. “You said you’d like to speak to me again, sir?”
“Ah, yes. Do sit down, Mr Lassiter.”
A machine stood on a table in the corner. Gairden could not make it out: it was gleaming black, painted with floral bouquets, and had a series of small white buttons attached to steel arms that disappeared inside the machine. Each of the buttons bore a letter or a number.
“That’s one of the new caligraphs, sir.”
“And what does that do?”
“It makes letters on paper; very even, just like printed type. You press the keys.”
Gairden looked at the machine with distaste. The lettering of a human hand, be it hasty scrawl or copperplate or the awkward, childlike printing of the barely literate, connected one to the writer. Handwriting had, on occasion, helped him solve a case. What could one tell from the printing of a machine, every letter identical, no matter who pressed the keys? He turned his back on it, and sat down.
