Only . . . if he was trying to delay the Railway, he wouldn’t want the ransom to work, would he? There was still something missing. His ambition to hit Monsieur Lacan with a blunt axe still held, but perhaps he’d allow himself a couple of questions first.
Corinna asked sweetly: “Do I get to mark your homework?”
“Mebbe . . . when I know ye’ll give it ten out of ten.” In fact, he planned to throw it into the sea . . . Oh, God, why had he remembered the heaving, churning sea?
* * *
Ranklin had no sou’wester, not even a rain-proof, so he just buttoned his overcoat to the neck. He decided against any sort of hat – it might blow off and be found on deck – and, after a little thought, shoes and socks as well. Weren’t bare feet traditional for gripping a stormy deck? The bag of lead shot (which Lady Kelso didn’t know about), a handkerchief to dry his hands and a dry-battery torch and he was ready to go safecracking.
She knocked and came quickly into his cabin. “I told the steward we were both getting an early night and didn’t want to be disturbed. And I listened at Dr Streibl’s door and he’s moaning louder than the wind, so I think we’re safe from him. Good luck.”
Ranklin took the companion-way that led to the outside world rather than go through the saloon. The door onto the deck wasn’t locked – presumably in case they had to abandon ship – and he stood outside it for a moment, rain lashing into his face like dust-shot, hoping his eyes would adjust to the darkness. They didn’t much; a stormy night at sea is a very dark place, and a wet, noisy and wallowing one as well. The Loreley didn’t just roll, she also wanted to put her nose down and whuffle along like a badger. There were long shuddering spells when he guessed the propeller had come clear out of the water.
But when he started moving forward, at least there was a rail along the deck-house wall to grip. He worked along it towards the distant light of the bridge, step by step, hand by hand.
The door of the Captain’s Buro was unlocked, just as Ranklin had hoped and expected. Locks and bolts were civilian concepts: a senior officer’s cabin was sacred. He pulled the door shut behind him and kept gripping the knob as a hand-hold against the wandering floor.
It was even darker in here, he’d certainly need the torch. But the cabin had windows onto the main deck and roving half-shaded torch-light would look far more suspicious than drawn curtains, so after one flash to locate himself, he staggered about in the darkness pulling them shut. Then he sat in the desk chair, which was bolted to the floor, and played the torch around.
Apart from being the Captain’s office, it must be his sea cabin – where he dossed down for an hour or two between storms – because it had a bunk along one wall and a clothes cupboard next to it. That just about left room for the desk, chair and the safe. It was about twice as big as the one on the train and spattered with old-fashioned brass trimmings, and perhaps a professional safe-cracker would have rubbed his hands with glee – if he could have got on board a naval vessel to begin with.
Ranklin seated himself on the floor in front of it, peered at the dial – a normal numerical one – and then dug in his pocket for his diary. It had two months’ of fiction about Snaipe’s dinner engagements and dentist’s appointments, and at the back some figures posing as expenses, bets and train times. He began decoding.
“First crack the owner of the safe,” Mr Peters the locksmith had advised, and Ranklin had come as prepared as he could. So the first number to try was the Kaiser’s birthday: 27-01-59. He spun the knob two full turns anticlockwise, then onto 27. A full turn clockwise and onto 01. Then 59. If that had been right, he should have heard a small bar falling into place along the three notches on the now-aligned discs. He didn’t, but there was plenty of noise from the ship and the sea, so he tugged at the handle anyway. Still nothing.
Start again with the Kaiser’s accession as King of Prussia: 15-06-88. Nothing.
Then the date the German Empire was proclaimed at Versailles: 18-01-71. More nothing, and he began to doubt the Captain’s patriotism.
So try his professionalism: Grossadmiral von Tirpitz’s birthday, 19-03-49.
He couldn’t remember what the remaining numbers were, though probably one was Admiral Prince Heinrich, the Kaiser’s brother. And none of them worked. Just for the hell of it he tried 10-20-30 and a few like it, in the faint hope it was still at the combination the makers had set all those years ago, but somebody had gone to that small trouble.
He gave up and flashed the torch around. As Lady Kelso – and Mr Peters before her – had said, people could be stupid enough to scrawl the combination on the wall, even on the safe, but while a navy might have nothing against stupidity, it deplored such untidiness. Or they wrote it inside a desk drawer, so he returned to the chair and tried the drawers. They were locked, probably just to stop them falling out in the storm, yet he wasn’t skilled enough to pick even them: what chance did he stand with a safe?
Outside, the sea thundered and the wind shrieked in the rigging. Overhead, he heard the clump of booted feet on the bridge and the occasional ting of the engine-room telegraph – reassuring sounds, for as long as they were there, they weren’t catching him here. But it didn’t advance his cause.
Nor did the photograph of, presumably, the Captain’s wife on the wall. Ranklin caculated that if the combination were her birthday and he could guesss her age within five years, he’d have about 1800 combinations to try (even assuming the Captain remembered his wife’s birthday). He began a desultory search of the desk baskets and found plenty of figures, but all temporary ones: distances steamed, kilos of coal and other stores embarked, dates on letters and forms . . .
There was also a faded photograph of the Loreley itself when she had been launched in 1885 as the Mohican. There were a few figures in the caption, so he tried combinations of the gross and net tonnage – 53-63-64 and 36-45-36 and was left with the builders’ number 90061.
Putting a zero on the front meant dialling 00, which was impossible, so he added it at the end: 90-06??10. Click.
He didn’t believe it and the pull on the door was pure habit, but it opened and the torch shone on – paperwork. A mass of paperwork, and he couldn’t believe that, either. As in a trance, he pulled a heavy book free and saw it was the current German Navy code. A bulky sealed envelope turned out to be instructions in case of war. Increasingly desperate, he shuffled envelopes and pamphlets all stamped GEHEIM – secret. He stared numbly as the torchlight played over a spy’s treasure trove which he was totally unprepared to deal with. And not a single, solitary centime of gold in sight.
Automatically he shut the door and spun the dial to lock it, then sat back. Oh, he could see what had happened, all right. The noble military mind at work: the real treasure was codes and sealed orders, sorry, no room for mere gold, shove it in my socks drawer.
Well, had the bloody man shoved it in his socks drawer? Crawling as the safest way to move around, it took him under half a minute to find the four boxes in the bottom of the clothes cupboard under a collection of sea-boots.