ensure that your parents are moved to somewhere safe.”
Lord Buttermere looks angrily at Chisholm. I can tell that Buttermere wants this man Sullivan to be as scared as possible, perhaps because he thinks it might make him talk more. But as before, it is Gwyneth who asks the next question.
“So, when you got to your cabin?...”
“The packing cases were already here…”
“And – there were six of them? This is important: you are sure there were six?”
“Yes. There were definitely six cases in total. They filled my cabin. Each one was huge. You can see, even my bed was dismantled, I had to sleep on the floor. Not that I could get much sleep, worrying about being mixed up in this smuggling, and about my parents back in Brooklyn.”
Gwyneth looks almost pityingly at him. But she continues the questioning. “Mr Sullivan, now please, listen and answer carefully. This is the most important question of all. Where are the packing cases now?”
“A man knocked on my cabin door – last night, in the dead of the night. It woke me with a fright, it was such a shock to my nerves. At first I thought maybe it was the ship’s staff, I was scared, I thought cabin stewards had found out about the smuggling and had come to search for the cases. So I didn’t answer it. But the knocking carried on and on, and in the end I opened the door. It was a man, I don’t know his name, anything. He just told me: we must move these crates. Just the two of us. Each one weighed a ton.”
“Where did you take them?”
“Along that corridor, then through a door… down. Stairs and stairs. It was exhausting. He led the way… I can’t describe it.”
“Can you show us?”
The man nods. But before he can step towards us, Lord Buttermere speaks.
“Not so fast, please. First, that suitcase.”
“I’ll open it. May I?” Gwyneth asks the man.
Mr Sullivan, still white-faced, nods. Gwyneth bends, unclips the frail clasps of the case. From behind I see the outline of her face: her cheek swells in a smile, and I hear a quiet laugh.
She turns and smiles saucily. “Lethally dangerous, Lord Buttermere. I’m sure London will explode when these arrive.” She’s holding up a white shape of frills and flounces: a pair of ladies’ knickers.
Chisholm laughs, Axelson guffaws, but Buttermere doesn’t crack a smile. “Lead on, then, Mr Sullivan. Show us where you took the crates.”
29.Shots in the dark
We’re clattering down flight after flight of iron steps. It’s like the ship is bottomless. Even that first time, when I ran from Inspector Trench, I didn’t descend this far. I notice a humming sound, too: it gets stronger with almost every rung of the stairs. I think of the timid Mr Sullivan and Jimmy Nolan, working together, shifting heavy crates, the size of coffins, down these iron staircases. To where?
Finally, Sullivan has stopped, and he’s pointing. “Here.”
There’s no lighting except the professor’s and Chisholm’s flashlights as, one by one, we step through a hatch in the floor and descend a small ladder. Two minutes later, we’re all standing at the foot of the ladder, crammed in blackness in a tiny, airless room. I have the strange sensation that this huge ship is playing an evil game with us: teasing us, leading us on, as if it is a living labyrinth, boxing us into smaller and smaller spaces. Riveted iron walls seem to press in on us from all sides. The humming sound is now so strong I can physically feel it: the room seems to reverberate and I feel the shaking penetrate my flesh, as if my very bones are vibrating. With the noise, the darkness, the shaking, and the lack of air – the tiny room feels like a place from a nightmare: a trap.
But there is one other way out: the smallest door I’ve yet seen is straight in front of us. Axelson and Chisholm glance at each other grimly: they must know what this place is. I hear under Chisholm’s breath “Oh hell. Anywhere, anywhere but here.”
“Open the door.” Lord Buttermere is speaking to Sullivan.
Sullivan’s trembling hand grips the handle, pushes the door open inch by inch. In front of us appears a dark tunnel. In the beam of the flashlights, it stretches away into unseen distances.
The professor speaks. “The shaft tunnel.”
Chisholm whispers to me. “One of the tunnels where the ship’s propeller shafts run from the engines out to the back of the ship. The shafts needs oiling to keep them turning smoothly. So usually the tunnels are lit and manned, but at the moment this one seems to be deserted. Of course, the shaft tunnels are narrow, and they stick out from the body of the ship: they’re almost surrounded by sea-water. If there was an explosion here, half the back of the ship would come off.”
“Where is the propeller shaft itself?”
And then I see it: a shiny steel cylinder, maybe a yard in width, catching the beam of light. It’s endlessly long, disappearing away from us into the blackness.
I hear Sullivan’s quavering voice again.
“Below… the shaft. That’s where we put the packing cases. It was terrifying to do.”
Gwyneth speaks again. “Let’s take a look then. Show us.”
The humming and vibrating has increased again. My brain seems to shake inside my skull. I hear Axelson’s voice, explaining the situation to us all.
“The steel shaft rotates with enough power to push a fifty-thousand ton ship through the water. It spins at a phenomenal speed. Touch it – and if you’re lucky, the friction will take your skin off. If you’re unlucky, the force will pull you off the gangway and wrap you round the shaft.”
My teeth chatter with the vibration, my limbs shake, as one by one we squeeze through the tiny door, shuffle along in the darkness, into the tunnel. We now stand right alongside the whirling, thrumming shaft.
The flashlight beam shines down, and yes: there they are. Six coffin-like crates, laid out end-to-end in a line, beneath the turning metal cylinder. But then I notice: the lid of one crate is askew. It’s been opened.
We’re all standing in a line on a narrow metal gangway that runs alongside the shaft. I’m at the back. Chisholm is in front of me, then Buttermere, Gwyneth, Axelson and finally Sullivan at the front. It feels horribly precarious: there is no handrail. Just a few feet of air between us and the spinning steel.
“Stop right there.”
The voice echoes eerily along the tunnel, the sound bouncing off the metal walls. With the echoes and the humming, I can’t even tell if it’s coming from ahead of us or behind us. But I recognize the accent, all too well.
Chisholm shouts into the darkness. “Who’s there?”
“Well, I think you know the answer to that question, Mr so-called Black Velvet. And if you don’t all leave this tunnel, right now, I’ll blow us all to Kingdom Come.”
I realize: Jimmy Nolan’s voice is coming from behind us. In fact, he’s speaking from close behind me: I can feel his breath on my neck. I turn to look behind me, and I gaze into a desperate, almost wild face, lit by the glare of the flashlights. In one hand, the hand with the signet ring, Nolan holds a cigarette lighter: in the other, a stick of dynamite. A single inch of fuse protrudes from it: its frayed end catches the flashlight beam.
Buttermere’s voice is icily calm. “Mr Nolan, put down the dynamite. You can’t win here. Even if you have given up on bombing London and now plan simply to sink the Olympic, your plans are exposed. You’re finished.”
“Well if I’m finished, then how come I’m the one holding the means to kill us all? Because you haven’t even got a hand-gun among you. So, ladies and gentlemen, you are all going to walk past me, out of the tunnel, up the stairs, and back up to the sunshine.”
“No.” That’s Chisholm. “There’s no room to squeeze past you. If any of us touch the shaft, we’re dead. So – before all these people can leave the tunnel, you must go out first.”
“I think you’ve forgotten that I’m the one holding the dynamite. Even if you hold your own lives cheap, you know what will happen if I light this. This stick will kills us all – but it might n
ot be enough by itself to explode the shaft tunnel. But of course, it will detonate all that.” He nods towards the six crates. “And then there will be no shaft tunnel and no Olympic. So, all you fine dandy people, you have no choice.”
I can see that Buttermere, Axelson and Chisholm are all calculating the odds. To leave this man down here with six cases of dynamite is madness. But at least we might be able to give the alarm and start the evacuation of the ship.
Nolan is speaking again. “Now we’re going to test my idea – that you leave, one by one. First in the queue to leave, at the back of your group, is this young lady.” A single finger points between my eyes. “Green eyes. I recall she came to visit me in Hell’s Kitchen. And maybe I glimpsed her at Chelsea Piers, too, when I peeped out from the ship’s door and saw my men slaughtered in cold blood by the guns of New York cops. So – you, Miss Butter-Wouldn’t-Melt. Gather up those pretty skirts and slide past me. You might have to squeeze up close to me. You never know, Missie: you might enjoy it.”
There’s nothing else to do. I will have to maneuver round him: dynamite on one side, the shaft on the other. I wonder what will happen, I think, if the material of my dress catches in the spinning shaft. Then I blank that out of my mind and take a step towards Nolan. A second step and I can feel the moisture in his breath. A third, and I place one foot in the narrow gap between his shoes. I press up against him as I squeeze my other leg past his