across a restaurant table than in an interview room.
“‘Nature has burst the bonds of art,’” said Bryant, removing his wet coat. “You remember who said that, John?”
“It was the night we confronted William Whitstable outside his house. You reckoned you’d heard the phrase somewhere before.”
“That’s right, I had. This morning, I remembered where.”
Although they ate here infrequently, their host greeted them like old friends and showed them to a table beneath the moulting head of a wall-mounted elk. “It’s Gilbert and Sullivan, of course,” said Bryant. “But I couldn’t recall from which opera. Then I remembered that the poet Bunthorne sings the line in
“That William Whitstable knew about the alliance as well.”
“Precisely. Perhaps all of the victims did. I think the Whitstable family is divided into those who know about the survival of the alliance and those who don’t. God, how they like to keep their secrets. Now we begin to see the real reason why William damaged the painting on that rainy Monday afternoon at the National Gallery.”
Bryant raised his hands, framing an image. “Imagine this. After a severe fire the Savoy Theatre is put up for sale, and to everyone’s horror an offer from the Japanese is accepted over the British bid. Government help remains unforthcoming. The prime minister has his hands too full with the unions to care about keeping a theatre in British hands. Peter Whitstable concocts a strategy with the family lawyer: they’ll take charge of the Savoy by arranging to have the Japanese compromised and removed. The Whitstables want the theatre because of its symbolic place in their family history.
Their secret system can no longer be trusted to take care of business rivals – for some mysterious reason it isn’t working properly any more, and hasn’t been for some years. The family is having to fight its own business battles. Peter and his lawyer must take control of the situation. They discuss their plan with William, but he disapproves of their illegal tactics. The Japanese have shown nothing but good intentions. The Whitstables, on the other hand, are about to behave like common crooks, swindling them out of the deal.
Does William tell Peter and Max that he’ll have nothing to do with it, that family ideals are being betrayed? No, in typically excessive Whitstable fashion William makes a public statement by destroying the painting that commemorates everything that the alliance once stood for.”
“Then William couldn’t have known that his brother was simply planning to continue the practices of his ancestor.”
“There’s the irony.” Bryant accepted a menu. “Peter and the lawyer knew exactly what James Makepeace Whitstable had been up to, but it seems that William genuinely had no idea. If only we could talk to them now.”
“We don’t need to. We have a first-hand account of the event from the old man himself.” May tapped the side of his briefcase.
“You have the diary with you?”
“It’s not a diary, just a brief chronicle of the alliance and its aims, something James must have read out to his future partners. But he’s added his own notes at the end.”
“Let me see it,” pleaded Bryant.
“In a minute. Food first.”
Their waiter listed the specials without explanation of their contents, it being assumed that if you ate here, you knew what you were in for. “We have spring, Crecy, or julienne soup,” he offered, “
“What have you got for dessert?” asked Bryant, rudely interrupting him in mid-flow.
“Anchovy cheese, Aldershot pudding with raspberry water, rice meringue, cabinet pudding, and gooseberry jelly.”
Bryant sat back, delighted. Like the Victorians they emulated, the restaurant kept an ostentatious table. This was the first time the detective had thought about something other than the Whitstable family in weeks. May opened his briefcase and withdrew the yellowed pages of the account. “To be honest, I was having trouble reading it,” he admitted. “It’s written in such convoluted gobbledygook I thought it would be better to let you translate.”
Bryant wasn’t sure whether to take this as a compliment or an insult. He accepted the document and carefully opened it, attempting to read the title as he searched for his spectacles. “A proposition for inducing financial longevity, eh? Sounds dodgy.” Each page was covered in finely wrought black ink. After this followed a separate document, also handwritten. The heavy italicization of the letters made deciphering difficult. While May tasted the wine, his partner read on. After a while, he banged his fist on the table so hard that a pair of waiters resting at the rear of the restaurant jumped to attention.
“So that’s it!” he cried. “I knew it had to be something of the sort.”
“What is it?” asked May, not unreasonably.
“Much as I hate to say so, you were right. Why else would James Whitstable have invited craftsmen to be the founding members of the alliance, and not financial experts? He suggested the building of a mechanical device. Listen to this:
Bryant took a sip of wine and leaned forward, laying the pages before him. “So James Whitstable sees the finances of the guild failing. Foreign rivals are producing cheaper wares in direct competition to the guild’s own exports. He must act quickly, or their empire will be undermined and nothing will be left for their heirs. He is taken with the germ of an idea, and invites to London the men who may be persuaded to help him carry out his plan.
On the afternoon of twenty-eight December 1881, he lunches with his group, filling the craftsmen’s susceptible heads with talk of light and dark, preserving the strength and sanctity of the guild, and God knows what else. No doubt these loyal, hardworking men are easy to entice. They’re probably amazed to be in London at all – and to be taking lunch at the Savoy!
After the meal, he trots them to the theatre next door – to witness a display which he has already been informed will take place. Suddenly they see that everything he says is true; James Makepeace Whitstable has predicted the future, when light will triumph over darkness for all time. They’re given proof that a bright new age is about to begin. Who could fail to be impressed?
Whitstable then leads them, awe-filled, back to his suite, and draws up a charter which they sign. He presents each of them with a commemorative gold pocket watch manufactured by the Watchmakers’ Guild, inscribed with the sacred flame. He wraps up his speech in supernatural mumbo-jumbo, invoking the curse of the Stewards of Heaven. Then he swears them all to secrecy, and looks to them for a solution to his problems.
And his work pays off. The craftsmen put their heads together, and come up with a tracking device that will calculate the guild’s accumulation of profit according to the information fed into it. The machine will also identify the owners of shares.”
“You mean to tell me that the Alliance invented a primitive form of computer?”
“No, because their system isn’t binary. Unfortunately, they were craftsmen before they were mathematicians. But you’re on the right track. I’m only halfway through. Let me read the rest.”
“Your pigeon’s getting cold, or hot, or something,”May pointed out.
But he had lost Bryant to the pages. Once in a while the detective would release a ‘Hmmm’ or an ‘Aha!’ Finally he looked up, realized that his meal was still sitting before him, and began to eat voraciously. Neither spoke until the plates were cleared.
“Well,” declared Bryant, wiping his mouth with a napkin, “it’s made of brass.”
“Is that it?” cried May. “Isn’t there anything else?” Bryant set down his napkin and checked the pages again. “It took them two years to build and calibrate the device.”
“My God, how big is this thing?”
“I don’t know, it doesn’t say. But it’s mechanical, and it runs on electricity. Is it possible that it could still be running? I mean, there’s no such thing as a perpetual motion engine.”
