Titanic 2012 (inspector alastair ransom) Read online

  “Seems you too readily picture it. On the other hand, forms as a good a theory as any so far, I suppose,” conceded Reahall, lighting a pipe now. “Still, I wouldn’t have thought old Fiore or O’Toole for that matter capable of such. The other man, maybe.”

  “Perhaps the two ‘weaker links’ wished to impress the stronger man then. We see it all the time in law enforcement, correct?”

  Reahall eye-balled him. “Yes, we do.”

  “Men are goaded on too easily by a strong voice and a stronger will.”

  “That’s borne out many times over, yes. You do have quite a feel for the law, sir.”

  Ransom ignored this, scratching his mustache. “So… you think the Pinkerton agents are still aboard?” asked Ransom.

  “I’m sure we’ll find out what we need to know from them. If they’ve seen or heard anything strange about the ship yards tonight.” Reahall took a deep pull on his pipe.

  “What do you think precipitated the disappearance of one of their number?” asked Ransom. Then he laughed lightly. “I thought those fellows were supposed to be good. If they can’t find one of their own then how good can they be?”

  “I imagine he could well have stumbled onto something—some anarchist activity while on board… perhaps killed for it… his body somewhere inside the ship.”

  “It’d take all night to search a single deck on that thing; look at it.”

  Ransom smiled, thinking how he’d like to keep Reahall busy all night.

  Reahall added, “We’d need an army to cover it all.”

  “I understand there’re three gymnasiums aboard her.”

  “Three?” asked Ransom, amazed.

  “One for each level… ahhh class, you see.”

  “Of course, segregated quarters, segregated smoking rooms and wading pools, I’m sure.”

  “Look, Wyland, I’m going to call for help, and I suggest you make yourself scarce—as in extremely so.” Reahall went to a locked police phone box to make arrangements to get a small army to his location—to begin a thorough search of Titanic. “Constable Reahall here,” he said into the police box phone. I want two of the more modern day police wagons at Slip 401 shipyard. Yes, Harland & Wolfe.” He ordered up the petroleum-powered wagons which would be loaded with twenty-four uniformed officers. “Yes, I need as many men as can be spared and hurry!”

  Constable Ian Reahall then turned to again find the man he suspected of being Alastair Ransom gone.

  “Ahh… so you’ve taken my advice, Ransom, eh?” he said to the night, imagining it highly unlikely he’d ever see the strange private eye again. Being a steadfast protestant himself, the fact the Irish-American may’ve killed a priest did not particularly concern him, but if word got around Belfast, Reahall feared this Wyland-Ransom fellow would either turn up dead by the hand of Irish Catholic thugs who controlled parts of the city, or worse, the detective’s reputation among the street crowd, regardless of political and religious leaning, might well eclipse Reahall’s own! “I want none of that,” he muttered to the night. “I don’t need that kind of competition here.”

  One way or another, he would rid Belfast of Ransom aka Wyland. If the man did not leave of his own accord, Reahall would arrest him and extradite him to Chicago. He was convinced this private investigator was his man. It wasn’t any one thing he’d said or done but an accumulation of remarks made to various sources over a long period of time that added up to a perfect patchwork of circumstantial evidence.

  Tonight had only solidified Reahall’s suspicions, and any day now a photograph would arrive in the mail, a photo of the man in Chicago who’d escaped authorities when he convinced his jailers that he just wanted to go home long enough to shower and shave. Obviously, the man could talk his jailers into anything. He’d convinced them that he’d be back in a couple of hours. This after months of card playing with his jailers, appealing to their humanity, telling them he wanted to be ‘presentable before the judge’.

  This fellow Ransom was as sly as Aesop’s fox. He’d had a police escort but he also had the help of friends who secreted him away through an underground passage found in the home of a Dr. Tewes. When they stopped for a tooth extraction, which was in fact a distraction, ‘supposedly’, the guards were distracted as well by a three-course meal cooked up and served up by another member of the Tewes family—the doctor’s daughter. Meanwhile, another friend named Keane, dressed in Ransom’s clothes, had dropped two stories to the ground and slipped out of the city on a road going north for Canada. This while Ransom himself made for a boat leaving up and out of the Great Lakes for Boston. Escape from America came next. That had been two decades ago.

  Far from the shadows of the shipyard and Titanic now, Alastair Ransom had gone home and to bed; enough was enough for one day, and he was no longer a young man. In his sixties, while healthy and strong, his limp and the pain in his right leg troubled him more than ever. The satirist in his mind pictured him a doddering, lonely old man in a rocking chair on the porch of the asylum wondering how he had lost his chance at a family and children. The satirist also told him he’d already outlived the average large-city lawman’s lifespan; in fact the average man! He was indeed old and heavy, and heavily invested in his work, and heavily invested in his scars from the violence and anarchy of the infamous Haymarket Riot of 1876. A labor riot that’d left him with a cane and a limp when a young man on the Chicago police force. Not to mention the number of times Dr. Fenger had patched him up—once when Gabby had shot him, quite unintentionally but the exit wound scar remained despite the girl’s intent.

  After all that this local constable had learned of this private eye, Reahall must be feeling fairly confidant if not downright certain of his gut instinct; an instinct that said Wyland and Ransom were one and the same.

  Still, despite the circumstantial evidence and all of the good constable’s guesswork, the man would proceed with caution, no doubt. He must be certain. He wouldn’t want to look the fool among his peers—arresting an innocent man.

  Ransom felt a profound weariness come over him. He was tired of running. He also knew deep down that no matter how far he ran, no matter where he chose to hide, what with modern police sciences such as the skillful use of the Marconi wireless, photography, and fingerprint labs, he could easily be found out these days.

  Still he’d always wanted to see more of the world, and he loved sailing; he’d like to see the Swiss Alps some day. He’d read all of Mark Twain’s travel correspondences gathered in books and recalled how Twain said the two most beautiful places on Earth were Lake Tahoe, Nevada and Lucerne in Switzerland. From these thoughts of where to run to, he began thinking of those long ago days when he was a uniformed officer, how his training officer had pulled him away after a bomb blast at Haymarket—an event that seemed nowadays lost to history. His friend and training officer was himself wounded, and moments after pulling Ransom away from the blast area, this good man died with five other policemen. Six known anarchists were rounded up—the usual suspects—and executed: one each for every murdered police officer.

  Nowadays in semi-retirement and full-time hiding in plain sight, Alastair needed his drink, the occasional morphine, his card games, and he needed his sleep. Life in Belfast and other cities in Europe since arriving abroad had grown stale and boring until the two young interns had brought him this interesting case. He genuinely believed this case would end in a clear determination: anarchists at work both in the mines and around the shipyards—as they’d been at Haymarket in Chicago not so long ago. This case would determine again that normally good, rational, hard-working men, if made to feel they’d been cheated and disenfranchised, fell easy prey to talk of vengeance and destruction. These missing men had surely been hatching some insidious plot to destroy Titanic. To strike a blow at the rich and powerful in the name of the poor and powerless.

  But in the end what would be accomplished if victory came to him for solving such a case as this here in Belfast? “Any wonder the Alps are calling
?” he said to the empty room.

  Still the Alps seemed a world away from Belfast, whose streets reminded him of his home—of Chicago. In fact, he had been seriously contemplating the idea of returning to America, perhaps New York, Titanic’s destination if the ship ever made it out of its slip. Still a first class ticket was out of the question; he’d have to go second or perhaps even third class. The money from the two interns was more than he had earned at the card table, and he believed now he had money enough for a berth somewhere in the bowels of the ship.

  “But can I be away before that damned constable puts me in irons?” he mused. An extremely important consideration for a man with a murder charge hanging over his head.

  It’d make a fine upstanding dramatic escape indeed to board Titanic as a crewman. Still, while he certainly knew his way around a merchant ship, this monster cruiseliner might be another matter altogether. He laughed aloud here in his room, head to pillow, imagining himself in a waiter’s vest and shirt, one of those scrawny neckties choking him.

  Perhaps he could sell himself as a bartender; he certainly knew enough about drink and the difference between rye, bourbon, vodka, and brandy. He imagined himself in this role aboard Titanic, serving drinks to the richest men on the planet. Titanic’s passenger lists were already legend and printed in the papers for the quality of the names aboard—the heads of industry, commerce, transportation, and state. It was to be a rich man, poor man voyage indeed. The poor down in steerage, second class passengers in the middle sections of the ship, and the rich sleeping up in spacious compartments above. With the size of the ship and descriptions he’d read and heard, even in advertisements, he imagined it not unlike the rungs in Hell or Perdition for anyone with no money in pocket. All her glamour and beauty and size in a sense made Titanic the ultimate floating representation of society with its pearls and its warts intact.

  Indeed, the ship was a perfect metaphor for social hierarchy. The first class people with the fattest pocketbooks enjoying every amenity and having full reign over the upper decks; they had access to the gymnasium, a wading pool, the ballroom, and a billiard and smoking room where he might find some card players with deep pockets, and as mentioned in brochures and advertisements, all the amenities: the best food and drink, along with a gymnasium, a thirty-yard swimming pool, a Turkish bath, a live band, and the attention of the staff, the officers, and the captain.

  Further down the ‘wedding cake’ of decks, the second-class ticket holders, followed then by the third-class ticket holders, who were lucky to have berths at all. For them, the equation was: the lower in the ship your bed, the more areas on the ship denied. They faced locked gates and one of the 900 crewmembers to remind them of their place. The second-class ticket holders were also denied access to the upper decks. The middle decks for them. And if something untoward were to happen—like a boiler exploding, what then? The ship, after all operated on steam and lots of it. It had not been so long ago that a steamboat on the Mississippi had exploded, killing almost all aboard.

  Ransom imagined that first on the lifeboats would be first class women and children; a good reason to hold onto one’s stubs. Those in the lowest reaches of the ship did not stand a chance should there be an emergency aboard such a gargantuan vessel.

  These were the last thoughts Alastair Ransom had before the pounding at the door came. A most demanding pounding. Raehall, no doubt, with backup, come to haul him in. He had half expected it and fully imagined it. Reahall and his thugs in uniform breaking in and placing him in irons, hauling him to the Belfast jail where he’d await extradition to America and Chicago. The place from which he had indeed fled in order to escape a sure hanging as a disgraced Chicago Police Inspector. While innocent of the crime, he had cultivated so many enemies in the system and in the city that a bandwagon load of them saw his being jailed on the charges as their chance for revenge. They had all pounced at once.

  Dr. Jane Tewes and her daughter, Gabby, along with a handful of friends had saved him but for what—this life in Belfast? It had not been easy all these years since 1893. In fact, he had pretty much lived at a subsistence level. He’d lost Jane and Gabby along with any chance of having a home and family; the family he’d once thought was his for the asking. All of it gone now. Gone along with Ransom’s city—his Chicago. All of it and its people going on without him in pleasant ease, his absence causing no pain… as if he’d never existed, he supposed, that the likes of Inspector Alastair Ransom was gone from their midst was, in the end, a good thing indeed.

  After all, he had cultivated a reputation as the most dangerous man in a city known as the slaughter house to the nation—the city of big shoulders.

  He took his time going to the door and pulling it open on the dingy little Belfast apartment that was home, his hands held out for the irons, tired of running all over Europe, only to find standing before him not Reahall and his burly cops but the two interns, Thomas and Declan. “Lads… what the devil time is it?

  “We’ve slipped from the dormitory, detective,” said Declan as he and Thomas rushed past Ransom and into the small billet—aptly named as he must pay a weekly bill for the use of the apartment. “We need your help,” added Thomas, “to break into the lab.”

  “We need you as a witness,” explained Declan, trying to soften Thomas’ remarks.

  “Break in? Your first thought was me?” Ransom tried to shake off sleep. He groggily added, “What sort of witness?”

  “We’ve three bodies now at the morgue.”

  “Three? Three bodies in the same condition, you mean?”

  “Reahall and his men scoured the ship, even used dogs,” said Declan.

  “The coppers ran some dogs into Titanic’s hull; they found my uncle’s remains along with O’Toole’s—” added Thomas. “All three suffered from the same devastation.”

  “It has to be chemical in nature—if not biological.”

  “If not both,” finished Thomas.

  “What of Dr. Bellingham? What does Enoch have to say about it all?”

  “He’s frightened. So’s the dean. Hell… so’s everyone.”

  “The entire surgical faculty is terrified,” added Thomas.

  “As they should be,” said Ransom, placing on a shirt to cover his hefty body.

  “Sir, they are cowards! They want to burn the bodies at the steel mill as soon as it opens in the morning.”

  “Cremation may be the best avenue,” he cautioned.

  “All of them—the constable, the dean, Dr. B, in all their combined intellect, they are acting out of fear,” continued Declan.

  Ransom held a hand up to the young intern. “To contain any possibility of contagion is a normal response to any outbreak of disease, quite typical.”

  “B-But damn it, man, there needs be some analytical examination of the condition of these men.” Declan paced the small room, bumping his head on an overhead beam that evoked a cry from him.

  “You live, sir, rather poorly don’t you?” Thomas observed, taking in the flat,” I-I mean for a man with such a reputation, Detective Wyland, this place looks like an artist’s billet.”

  “Thomas, have ye no manners?” shouted Declan.

  “Oh come now, Declan? It’s just a question.”

  “Not a lot of call for a private detective in Belfast, son—especially one who’s caught the eye of the local officials.”

  “Constable Reahall thinks you a menace, eh?” asked Thomas.

  “I fear, he thinks me some sort of problem, yes.”

  “What sort of problem?”

  “He has me confused with some… some murderer.”

  “Murderer?” gasped Thomas, shaken by the word.

  “Damn fool copper has me confused with someone else, I fear. Irritating is what it amounts to.”

  “But a murderer?” Declan’s repeating of the word hung in the air, and now both young interns cautiously eyed Ransom. “Of course, Constable Reahall’s dead wrong about Mr. Wyland, Thomas,” insisted Declan, who
then spoke to Ransom. “I’ve come to respect you, Mr. Wyland. So now, sir, will you help us or not?”

  “Help you do precisely what?”

  “Why break into the morgue,” Thomas replied.

  “At Mater Infirmorum? Are you mad?”

  “It’s off from the hospital, a separate surgery and morgue for us university students.”

  “Separate you say?”

  “On the grounds but yes, separate from the main hospital.”

  “And there is where the bodies lie in state?”

  “If you can call it that—yes,” Declan added with a shrug. “We can take you straight to the corpses.”

  “To what end?” he asked the young men.

  “We are surgeons!” shouted Thomas.

  The passion recalled Jane Tewes to Ransom’s mind—how passionate she was about being a surgeon, and the extreme lengths she’d gone to just for that reason, as fat, white-haired old men stood in her way. Now Ransom saw the same thing was happening here to these lads.

  Declan came close and near whispered, “We need to know what’s the root cause of the condition of those bodies. And you know as well as we, there is only one sure way to determine actual cause of death, and it isn’t by cremating the evidence.”

  “Is that what they want to do? Burn it? Outta sight, outta mind, is it?”

  “That’s about it, yes, sir.”

  “But you boys… you want to conduct an unauthorized inquest instead?”

  “We want to autopsy the dead,” Thomas continued for Declan, going to the window, peeking out. “You aren’t expecting anyone are you, Mr. Wyland, sir?”

  “Why? What do you see out there?”

  “One of those nasty steam-powered police wagons—a paddy. Coming this way it is.”

  Ransom heard the noisy wake-the-dead clatter of this thing racing toward them. In fact, it was growing deafening with each turn of the wheels. “It’s Reahall come for me now! You boys picked a helluva time to pinch me for a job.”