O’Gilroy shrugged; that detail hardly mattered. “But what’s he saying about them?”
“I suppose … that so many ships of each class – he can’t say more than nine in any class, but nine’s a lot of battleships anyway – went through the Canal in the last … well, since the last message, say.”
“Which way through the Canal?”
Ranklin missed a heartbeat, then remembered the cablegrams. “But there were twelve figures in each cable. Say, the first six mean westbound, the second six eastbound. Or vice versa.” He pondered. “It may not matter if we don’t understand the system exactly, as long as the people working it understand. Cross was never going to be part of it himself, just setting it up and recruiting the people to run it.”
“If he’d finished doing that. So we know what the messages will mean and how they’ll reach England, but are we thinking one of those Denmark fellas’ll be sitting by the Canal counting every ship for all of every day and night?”
“It doesn’t seem too likely,” Ranklin agreed. “So we don’t really know if he’d finished his recruiting – or whether we’ll be expected to.”
The first thing Ranklin did when they reached the Club was to go to the lavatory, burn the warship postcard and the cablegrams, and flush away the ashes. From being puzzling bits of paper they had become ticking bombs. And the two of them had passed that subtle divide between being men with suspect intent to ones holding secret knowledge intended to harm the German Empire – or some such legal phrase. They had begun to tick themselves, and he hoped Lenz and Reimers couldn’t hear.
They went up to Cross’s room next door where Ranklin intended to pack – or rather, have O’Gilroy do it – and leave his bags for the Club to worry about until he knew where he would be spending the night. Thieving was rare in Germany, near impossible in this Club, and, he thought wryly, inconceivable in his peculiar position. That was one small compensation for being under police suspicion.
There was a large, shapeless brown paper parcel on the bed and a servant hurrying in behind them to explain. They were the clothes Cross had been found dead in, sent by the police to the laundry or cleaners, now returned to Cross’s Kiel address. Just one of those little wheels that keep turning after death. And one of those little bills to pay.
Ranklin paid the servant and wondered what to do with the parcel. It was hardly worth sending to England, and he didn’t want to take it with him. In the end, he tore it open just from curiosity. Just underpants, a white shirt without a collar, dark flannel trousers torn at both knees and what looked at first like a dark blue sailing jersey, except made from thin cotton. Even without its rips and splits, it would have been no more protection against sea breezes than a spider’s web.
It was easy to see how Cross, dead, bloody and dirty, could have been mistaken for a seaman. But there was another aspect to those particular clothes; O’Gilroy put it into words: “Wearing them trousers and jersey he’d be near invisible at night. Cat burglar’s kit.”
Probably Cross had worn the jersey under his shirt at the restaurant, then changed vice versa when he abandoned his pink blazer. The jersey had a German label, so could have been bought for just that, very suspicious, purpose. And one which the police certainly wouldn’t have overlooked.
“But all that, prowling the locks at night, the connection with Dragan, suggests sabotage or something violent like that. Nothing to do with observing what warships use the Canal, which sounds much more what I’d expect him to be involved in. I don’t see how the two go together.”
26
By noon, they were waiting on a small wooden jetty that stuck out into the sea just across the road from the Club, among a small crowd that was mostly men in the usual white trousers and blue blazers. Although not vain, Ranklin was horribly conscious of looking wrongly dressed. He was sure his plain dark suit and waistcoat, perfectly cut, left him looking like a debt collector.
A dark mauve – or light purple – motor launch wallowed up to the steps and a sailor with KACHINA across his chest called up: “Any of youse gennlmen for the Kachina?” and then helped them aboard.
The boat was powerful, so they ripped across the crowded anchorage in a swerving charge, but not very big, so they rolled and slammed as they crossed the wakes of other boats. From the fittings fore and aft, Ranklin deduced it was carried on the Kachina’s davits: hence the small size.
Nothing in Ranklin’s background had given him any connection with the sea, but he had an eye for beauty, and those private steam yachts were simply the most lovely powered craft ever built. Indeed, they had no other purpose except to look and feel elegant. Their hulls had the sweeping length and sharp bow of clipper ships, carrying only long low deckhouses, tall raked masts and slim single funnels. Against the column of warships anchored in mid-channel, they looked like debutantes visiting a seedy boxing gym.
Even O’Gilroy, who could usually find a bad word for how the rich spent their money, was moved to comment: “If they was horses, I’d be wanting to back them all.” And the Irish do not joke about race horses.
The purple/mauve colour was repeated on Kachina’s funnel, the lettering on her white hull and the Sherring house flag at the mainmast. They managed the tricky stride to the accommodation ladder slung down the ship’s side and were met at the top by a salute from the ship’s Captain. At least, a white naval-cut uniform with four gold stripes and a goatee beard presumably wasn’t Sherring himself, although you could never be sure with rich men playing sailors. Just behind him was Corinna, grinning broadly.
“Well, hello, Mr Spencer. And good day, Gorman.” She was clearly enjoying the charade – and the day. She wore a plain white dress under a Sherring house-colour blazer, the same colour headband, and tennis shoes. Ranklin felt even more like a debt-collector and glowered internally.
“First, I’ll show you around, then we’ll have a drink,” she announced. “Follow me.”
Inside, the Kachina was even more elegant. Ranklin had expected something of a cross between the Spanish Main and the Bank of England: dark, heavy, ornate. But this was all lightness and light.
“Tell me,” he said, “how much did you have to do with decorating the interior?”
She grinned. “Quite a bit. Pop wanted something like the partners’ room at the bank, but I said this was where he got some value from what he spent on my education, so kindly step aside. And he did.”
“Wise man.”
“Except for his own suite. Maybe you’ll see that later.”
“Excuse me, ma’am,” O’Gilroy asked, “but what would ‘Kachina’ be meaning?”
“It means ‘spirit’ in the Hopi Indian language. There’s hundreds of them in their religion: the spirit of the wind, of the sun, the moon, the eagle. Strictly, Pop should have picked just one, whatever he wanted protecting the boat. But he said that was thinking smalclass="underline" he’d take the lot. And we haven’t had a complaint from a Hopi Indian yet.”
Alone in one of the corridors, she lowered her voice and said: “Say, I don’t know how you’re playing this, with Conall being your valet …”
O’Gilroy said: “Best keep it going. We’re doing it for a good reason and there’s trouble in forgetting it only a moment. I’m his servant and that’s all of it.”
“Okay, if you say so. I’ll get Jake – our chief steward – to look after you. I think they do themselves pretty well.” She hesitated, then asked mischievously: “Is he a good master?”
O’Gilroy rolled his eyes to heaven via the deckhead. “Oh, ma’am, the things I could tell ye and ye wouldn’t believe …”
“I feared so. I know the English.”
She and Ranklin wound up alone on the Main Deck – the top, open-air one – in cane armchairs padded with removable cushions, sipping a mint julep, a drink Ranklin had heard of but never met before. It suited the day perfectly: the gentle sway and creak of the big boat, the small yachts scudding about on some race of their own, the north-west breeze that pushed the stuffiness and smell of the city back on itself.