The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

Brewster stopped jawing and gave Bell what passed for a smile. “Are you sure?”

“Not court-of-law certain, but close enough to inform my opinion.”

Bell couldn’t bring himself to simply abandon the bodies. He opened the small travel bag of essentials Captain Fyrie had fetched from his cabin and tore a blank sheet of paper from his journal. On it he wrote the names of the two men as well as the approximate location of Alvin Coulter’s remains. He didn’t have any pound banknotes, so he pulled the last hundred-dollar bill from his wallet with instructions that each man be given a proper burial.

The miners were unmarried and had died far from where they were thought to have, so marking their graves was of no real import to the world, but Bell felt it was the right thing to do for men who had sacrificed so much and ended as heroes.

Moments later, two Leyland trucks rumbled into view from around one of the warehouses. Warner and Walt had more than succeeded. The men were all exhausted and yet wanted to be on their way, so moving the crates from the train to the lorries took little time and was done with a minimum of conversation. They placed the unconscious Vern Hall onto the bed of the truck with Josh Brewster, his back against a crate, holding Vern’s head in his lap to protect him from the worst of the bumps they were going to encounter.

“We should take him to a hospital,” Charlie Widney suggested.

“Like hell we will,” Brewster fired back, cradling his friend. “He’s staying with us.”

Bell didn’t want to abandon him in Glasgow. The authorities would eventually check hospitals for survivors of the train theft once the locomotive was discovered. Upon regaining consciousness, Hall would surely be arrested and questioned intensely, cutting the odds of the rest of them making it out of the country.

“All they’d do in a hospital is exactly what we’re doing, which is nothing,” Brewster added. “They can’t treat a head wound like this. Either he wakes up or he don’t.”

That wasn’t far from the truth either, Bell conceded. An X-ray would show the severity of the skull fracture, but there were no surgical fixes. Bed rest was certainly preferable to rattling around in the back of a truck, yet, as Brewster had said, it was up to Hall alone. He’d either regain consciousness or he wouldn’t.

It was the early-morning hours of April the fifth. Bell needed to get the men away from Glasgow before police were able to cordon off the city. Once he was past their dragnet, his next step was to get them out of Scotland. Only then would he worry about making contact with the London branch of the Van Dorn Agency. And no matter what arrangements Wallace had made, Bell knew he had an option of his own, but one that entailed performing an utterly unforgivable act.

Best not come to that, he thought as he led the two-vehicle caravan out of the factory complex. The gate watchman was tasked with monitoring people entering the sprawling facility, so he gave no thought to men leaving on what looked to be a delivery.

Hours later, when workers arriving for the Friday shift reported the abandoned train and its grim contents, the guard was able to retain his job by giving the police a fair description of the vehicles and men.

35

The next twelve hours for Bell and his few men were spent on the grueling drive to Newcastle upon Tyne, a soot-covered coastal city on the English Channel. They stopped only for fuel for the trucks and made do with hastily bought food from whatever pub was nearest the garage that had petrol to sell. For cash, they used the proceeds from the sale of a gold coin Bell had stopped and offered to a jeweler in one of the larger towns they’d sped throu

gh. The man paid only half its value because he could tell Bell was desperate and in a hurry.

In a country steeped in history dating back to the days of the Roman Empire, the roads were surprisingly bad—rural, rutted, and in some places so muddy that the men had to unload the trucks and carry the crates by hand to get them to dry ground. To Bell, so used to living in America’s burgeoning cities, it was like stepping back a hundred years.

It was nearing dark when they came to a village several miles north of the industrial center of Newcastle. There was a garage with a full gas storage tank on a tall trestle to refill the trucks and the couple of cans they’d bought. There was also a small inn with a large barn in back out past an open plot planted as a vegetable garden. Bell wasn’t much interested in the amenities offered by the inn, except that it had a private telephone. The owner rented them three rooms and let them store the trucks in his barn. They snuck Vern Hall into a ground-floor room when the proprietor and his wife were in the kitchen preparing a meal for the men.

There was a single, shared washroom. Bell let the others go first, as he wanted to use the phone. His call to London went through remarkably quickly and he was soon speaking with one Davida Bryer, an East End girl, who explained that Joel Wallace hired her from time to time when he had need of a secretary. He’d left with strict instructions that she wait by the phone for a call, especially one from Isaac Bell.

“He speaks very highly of you, Mr. Bell,” Davida Bryer cooed. “I do hope I have the chance to meet you.”

She was trying to sound sophisticated but couldn’t hide the impoverished roots in her accent. Bell said, “Probably not this trip, Mrs. Bryer.”

“Oh, it’s Miss,” she corrected quickly, as if Bell didn’t know what she was up to.

“Did Joel leave any messages for me?”

“He did. He called earlier to let you know that he had arrived in Aberdeen and met the captain of the”—she paused as if reading—“um, the Ha, ah, va—”

“Hvalur Batur,” Bell supplied.

“Cor blimey, that’s an odd name now, isn’t it?”

“Miss Bryer . . .” Bell said with a tinge of frustration in his voice. He doubted she could type, sort, or file, but he imagined she was quite the looker.

“Right. The captain told Joel—um, Mr. Wallace—all about what happened with the fight and how you ran off in some lorries and stole a train. He said to tell you Arn made it back and that he’d been asked to mail a postcard by Mr. Hall and hoped it was okay.”

“Whose postcard?”

“Mr. Wallace thought you’d ask that. It was for Mr. Hobart to his wife.”