“Got it.” “It” turned out to be twenty-five metres of quarter-inch rope. Berenice climbed back into the motor and wrapped herself in the back-seat rug.
Ranklin gave the rope a quite useless but masculine tug. “Fine. How d’you – I mean, how should I fix it up?”
“Tie one end to a tree on the far side, then sit in a bush holding the other end. Let it droop in the water, and when the barge is on top of it, pull it taut. And remember to let go when you feel it pull back.”
“Splendid. Er – suppose it catches on the rudder instead?”
“The rudder is behind the propeller. Always,” she said patiently. “And if you don’t want to do it here, there’s a side road in the village where you can get the automobile right up to the towpath.”
“That sounds better, but we’ll have to wait for O’Gilroy and young Jay here. And thanks, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Corinna could think of several replies to that, but no ladylike ones, so instead she said: “Were you having a nice cosy gossip with Berenice?”
“I think she’s getting the idea that Gorkin isn’t on the side of the ang-What do anarchists say instead of ‘angels’?”
“No idea. What’s she going to do about it?”
“That may be the problem; I was trying to persuade her not to do anything. She may think she’s an anarchist, but she’s young and still believes in justice.”
“And you’re too old and worldly-wise for such nonsense, are you? Everybody believes in justice. Or revenge. It comes to the same thing.”
“Now who’s being worldly-wise?”
“At least you didn’t say ‘old’. When are we going to bed together again?” Corinna tended to say such things – originally because it shocked Ranklin, now more or less out of habit. Of course, she also tended to mean them.
“Don’t distract my thinking. I’m still wondering what we’ll do with Mrs Langhorn – if we get her. Offer to take her back to London with us and meet Grover out of jail, perhaps. I can’t see him wanting to come to France, and at least in London she’ll be out of reach of the Paris Press.”
“Ah yes: you were asking me what you can do to stop the story getting into the papers, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” Despite the petty successes of getting organised and out here, Ranklin had to remember they were still tilting into overall failure. Gloomily, he leant against the parapet again and stared at the still water. “Can you think of anything?”
“Can this Dr Gorkin get anything he likes published?”
“He’s connected with some anarchist rag, the Temps Nouveaux de Paris, so I assume they’ll print anything he wants. That must only have a tiny circulation, but I imagine the other Paris papers will-”
“They will, that’s normal. And what you fear is he’ll publish the whole thing about Grover being the King’s bastard son and all your attempts to hush it up.”
“Yes. All slanted and twisted and-”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure. Still, with a story like this any reputable paper would want to do some checking of its own . . . But if Gorkin can produce the boy’s mother-Oh, I see: you want to grab her before she can back him up, is that it?”
“Something like that. And if she’ll listen, tell her the whole tale about how Grover was set up and she was manipulated and impersonated. That’s where I rather hope Berenice might come in. But I just don’t know if Mrs Langhorn’s on their side still or if she’s being held prisoner on that barge.”
“You aren’t even sure she’s aboard the barge, are you?”
“Well, no, but if they’re running out, surely they’d take her along.”
“Hmm. But you’ve got an awful lot of unknowns even before you start hoping she’ll contradict the whole thing. And why should she? Even if she turns against Gorkin and all his works, she still stands to gain from telling about the King.”
Ranklin nodded glumly. “The Palace is preparing a denial, but . . .”
“Nobody remembers denials. Your one hope would be to get your own story out first.”
Ranklin stood up straight and peered at her, horrified. “You want us to announce this scandal about the King?”
“Oh no. No, no, no. It isn’t a story about the King, it’s about a conspiracy against the King. Then you go into the details of what they did: falsifying evidence, murder, kidnapping – the works. Get the Press seeing it from that angle and your intentions automatically become honourable, never mind your misdeeds. But only if you get in first.”
“The only stable explosive is one that’s exploded already,” Ranklin suddenly remembered.
“Hey?”
“It was something I said to Gorkin. Actually we were talking about a post-revolutionary society, but I suppose it applies to a good scandal as well.”
“Like don’t trust a volcano until after it’s erupted? Yes, I guess that’s about it.”
But Ranklin was thinking of the obvious snag: that journalists, like intelligence officers, must surely ask first: Who says so? “But if I tell the Press all this, it’s just gossip. And if I tell them I’m working for our government, then I’m obviously partisan.”
She looked at him critically but sympathetically. “Yes, it’s a great play, but you’re not the right leading man . . . Couldn’t you blackmail Gorkin to confess?”
“To perverting the course of justice, accessory to murder and kidnapping? What’s left to blackmail him with?”
“Ah,” she said thoughtfully, “we do have a bit of a problem there.”
“And even then, we’d still need Mrs Langhorn to take a vow of silence.” He sighed. “Well, it’s no worse than I’d expected, but thanks for spelling it out.”
“Are you going to be blamed for it all?”
“I’m not big enough to carry that much blame: they’ll crucify the whole Bureau. Get invited to the Foreign Office that night: it’ll be quite a party.”
The engine was under a hatch behind and to the left of the steering shelter. A short wooden ladder led down into the glitter of thick, oil-black bilge water and an overpowering smell of petrol, oil and hot metal. O’Gilroy went down very carefully, found a place to stand clear of the water, and Kaminsky handed down the torch. O’Gilroy shone it around.
Perhaps the little windowless space had originally been a locker for ropes, paint and so forth. Recently someone with too little time, money or engineering skill had made it the engine room. The engine itself – it looked like a Ford Model T – was bolted to a slightly sloping wooden platform with an extended drive shaft running out through a dripping gland to the canal beyond. A flat metal bar stretched the gear lever through a slot in the roof above, and the cooling water pipe looked like a length of old garden hose. The rest was a child’s scribble of pipes and wires, with items mounted anywhere: the coil box next to the gravity-feed petrol tank on the bulkhead, for instance, which made it a near-evens bet that everything would blow up before it shook itself apart.
There were a dozen things O’Gilroy wanted to check or improve, and he forced himself to remember he only wanted this boat to go less than two more miles. He sighed, tested the heat of the number 1 cylinder – that was the first to give trouble on Model Ts – and began unscrewing the sparking-plugs.
Two minutes later he climbed the ladder with two plugs in his pocket and began rummaging in an oil-soaked hessian bag of tools, bits of wire, nuts and bolts and anything else vaguely mechanical that was the engineering stores.
Kaminsky watched gravely. “Do you know what is wrong?”
O’Gilroy held up a sparking-plug in the lamplight to show the business end oily and crusted black. “That hasn’t sparked for miles. The problem is, the engine’s running too slow. You need a smaller gear-wheel in there.”
“Will it make the boat go faster?”
“A little, perhaps. But more important, it’ll let the engine run at a proper speed.”
As he expected, there were no new sparking-plugs among the tools. He opened his penknife and began delicately scraping the crusted plug clean.
Jay pushed his bicycle up the bank to the bridge parapet, propped it up and reached down to pull off his cycle clips with delicate distaste.
“Well?” Ranklin demanded. “Did you find the barge? And where’s O’Gilroy?”
“We found it, and he’s stayed there to help them repair the engine.”
“Bloody hell!”
“It does make a sort of sense. It’s stopped on an open reach where we couldn’t surprise it.”
When Ranklin thought about it, that did add up.
Jay added: “If he can repair the engine, that is.”
“Oh, he’ll fix it.” Ranklin’s technical training had come just too early to involve petrol engines, so he believed that, for him, they ran or stopped according to how they felt. But O’Gilroy understood such things, so this one would work for him. “But will we know when it’s coming?”
“You can hear it miles off on a night like this and across water. How do you plan to stop it?”
Ranklin told him, and Jay smiled admiringly at Corinna. “Brilliant, if I may say so.”
She curtsied. Ranklin went on: “Did you see Mrs Langhorn – any woman – there?”
“I only saw two men. But I got the impression there’s others on board. I was keeping my distance: they might have recognised me from this morning.”
Corinna asked: “What happened this morning?”
But before Jay could admit to yet another shooting incident, Ranklin started giving orders.