“Higgins had been tracking them — the notebooks — and he wrote to Mrs. Pule, who he suspected might know something of their whereabouts, but his writing to her just set her off. She came around to Godall’s very cleverly, knowing that to reveal to us that the notebooks existed and that Narbondo was alive would put us on the trail. She and the son merely followed us down from London.”
It made sense to me. Leave it to St. Ives to put the pieces in order. “Why,” I asked, “are they so keen on killing me, that’s what I want to know. I’m the lowly worm in the whole business.”
“You were available,” said St. Ives. “And you were persistent, snooping around their hotel like that. These are remarkably bloodthirsty criminals. And the Pules, I’m afraid, are amateurs alongside the doctor. Higgins didn’t have any idea on earth what it was he was reviving, not an inkling.”
St. Ives pushed his plate away and ordered a bit of custard. It was getting along toward ten o’clock, and the evening had wound itself down. The beer was having its way with me, and I yawned and said that I would turn in, and St. Ives nodded thoughtfully and said that he’d just stroll along over to the icehouse in a bit and see what was up. I slumped. I wasn’t built for it, not right then, and yet it was me who had found out about the business up in Norway. I was pretty sure that I understood the icehouse, and it didn’t seem fair that I be left out. “It’s early for that, isn’t it?” I asked.
St. Ives shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“I suggest a nap. Just a couple of hours to rest up. Let’s tackle them in the middle of the night, while they sleep.”
St. Ives considered, looked at his pocket watch, and said, “Fair enough. Stroke of midnight. We’ll be across the hail, just in case anyone comes sneaking around.”
“Knock me up with fifteen minutes to spare,” I said, getting up. And with that I toddled off to my room and fell asleep in my clothes.
The night was howling cold and the sky clear and starry. There was a moon, but just enough to hang a coat on. We had slipped out the back and taken my route along the seawall, none of us speaking and with the plan already laid out. Hasbro carried a revolver and was the one among us most capable of using it.
Absolutely no one was about. Lamps flickered here and there along the streets, and a single light glowed in one of the windows of The Hoisted Pint — Willis Pule turning Higgins into an amphibian, probably. The shadowy pier stretched into the moonlit ocean, and the icehouse loomed dark and was empty in the weeds — very ominous, it seemed to me.
We wafered ourselves against the wall and waited, listening, wondering what lay within. After a moment I realized that Hasbro was gone. He had been behind me and now he wasn’t; just like that. I tugged on St. Ives’s coat, and he turned around and winked at me, putting a finger to his lips and then motioning me forward with a wave of his hand.
We crept along, listening to the silence and ducking beneath a bank of dirty windows, hunching a few steps farther to where St. Ives stopped outside a door. He put a finger to his lips and a hand on the latch, easing the latch down gently. There sounded the hint of a click, the door swung open slowly, and we were through, creeping along across the floor of a small room with a broken-down desk in it.
Some little bit of moonlight filtered in through the window — enough to see by now that our eyes had adjusted. Carefully, St. Ives pushed open another heavy door, just a crack, and peered through, standing as if frozen until he could make out what lay before him. He turned his head slowly and gave me a look — just a widening of the eyes — and then pushed the door open some more.
I caught the sound of snoring just then, low and labored like that of a hibernating bear, and when I followed St. Ives into the room, both of us creeping along, I looked for Captain Bowker, and sure enough there he was, asleep on a cot, his head turned to the wall. We slipped past him, through his little chamber and out into the open room beyond.
It was fearfully cold, and no wonder. Great blocks of ice lay stacked in the darkness like silvery coffins beneath the high ceiling. They were half covered with piled straw, and there was more straw littering the floor and a pair of dumpcarts and a barrow and a lot of shadowy odds and ends of tongs and tools and ice saws along the wall — none of it particularly curious, considering where we were.
St. Ives didn’t hesitate. He knew what he was looking for, out and I thought I did too. I was wrong, though. What St. Ives was after lay beyond the ice, through a weighted door that was pulled partly open. We stepped up to it, dropping to our hands and knees to peer beneath it. Beyond, in a square slope-ceilinged room with a double door set in the far wall, was a metal sphere, glowing dully in the moonlight and sitting on four squat legs.
It’s Lord Kelvin’s machine! — I said to myself, but then saw that it wasn’t. It was a diving bell, a submarine explorer, built out of brass and copper and ringed with portholes. Mechanical armatures thrust out, with hinged elbows so that the device looked very jaunty, as if it might at any moment shuffle away on its piggy little legs. We rolled under the door, not wanting to push it open farther for fear of making a noise. And then all of a sudden, as we got up to dust ourselves off, there was noise to spare — the rattling and creaking of a wagon drawing up beyond the doors, out in the night.
A horse snorted and shook its head, and there was the sound of a brake clacking down against a wheel. I dropped to the ground, thinking to scramble under and into the ice room again before whoever it was in the wagon unlocked the outside doors and confronted us there. St. Ives grabbed my coat, though, and shook his head, and in a moment there was a fiddling with a lock and I stood up slowly, ready to acquit myself like a man.
The doors drew back, and between them, pulling them open, stood the remarkable Hasbro. St. Ives didn’t stop to chat. He put his shoulder against one of the doors, pushing it fully open while Hasbro saw to the other one, and then as St. Ives latched on to the harness and backed the horses and dray around and through the doors, Hasbro clambered up onto the bed, yanked loose the wheel brake, and began to unlatch a clutch of chain and line from the post of a jib crane bolted to the bed.
I stood and gaped until I saw what it was we were up to, and then I hitched up my trousers and set to. Lickety-split, passing the line back and forth, looping and yanking, we tied the diving bell in a sort of basket weave. Hasbro hoisted it off the ground with the jib crane, which made the devil’s own creaking and groaning, and St. Ives and I guided it by the feet as it swung around and onto the bed of the dray, clunking down solidly. Hasbro dropped down onto the plank seat, plucked up the ribands, clicked his tongue, and was gone in a whirl of moonlit dust, cantering away into the night.
It was a neat bit of work, although I had no real notion of its purpose. If the machine in the Strait was guarded by Her Majesty’s navy, then our villains had no real use for the diving bell anyway; that part of their adventure, it seemed to me, had already drawn to an unsuccessful close. But who was I to question St. Ives? He was damned glad to get the bell out of there; I could see that in his face.