The clerk was in fidgets beside me, rattling the articles in the sack. Hopkins was smoking – the first time I'd seen him do so.
Sampson was coming back towards us. There was a revolver in his hand, and it was more of a relief than anything to finally clap eyes on the thing. The young man followed behind, looking sheepish-like. He was making towards the clerk, and I thought: he's going to do him, but no. Gesturing back to the young man, he said: 'Now you'll take no harm, but you must wait until the job's done.'
Sampson looked at the clerk, who was looking at the gun.
'How many poor buggers have had a taste of that, then?' the little bloke asked.
I looked across at Hopkins, who was shaking his head. The little ink spiller was past finding out.
'Four,' said Sampson, 'since you ask.'
I put two and two together: the detectives at Victoria… and the Camerons.
Then the clerk gave voice to my own thought:
'And I suppose two of those were the Cameron boys. I knew those lads – one worked at our place.'
Long silence. Sampson broke his gun, looked down at the cylinders, perhaps weighing up whether he could spare a bullet on the little clerk.
'I enjoyed that business,' he said, shutting the gun sharply and looking up. 'Clean sweep, you see. Once you've done one, what's the point of leaving the other hanging about in the world? I mean, it's fucking untidy. No earthly use to any living soul, the pair of 'em, and one's absolutely cracked into the bargain.'
All the men about ought to be given into the charge of the police without further ado. But it was past time for worrying about that. My job was to keep alive.
Hopkins crushed his cigarette stump under his boot. I heard a train go jangling past beyond the shed walls.
'Here, you,' Sampson was saying to the little clerk, 'show us your writing hand?'
'I'm right-handed,' the clerk said brightly. 'What of it?'
Sampson had picked up an old, dead lantern. He passed it over to the clerk, saying, 'Cop hold… right hand.'
He walked away ten paces, and asked the rest of us to step back from the clerk. He raised the gun, and I thought: this is worse than all; this is the point at which I must step in. But I did not, and the gun was fired and the lamp shattered. In the silence that followed Hopkins folded his arms, and I looked at Sampson. He was now side on to us, drinking whisky from the bottle.
The clerk was holding his hand under my nose, seemingly overjoyed that it was still attached to him. 'Five hundred invoices a day,' he said, making a writing motion, '… and demurrage bills are a great scarcity across my desk, I can tell you that.'
Sampson walked over to the clerk, and presented him with the whisky bottle; the clerk drank.
'Pass it round,' said Sampson.
As the bottle came my way, Sampson led us all off the part of the shed he'd visited a moment before. We were approaching a little brick room built on to the shed wall. The door to it was shut, and the two cylinders stood outside: the big man and the little man (as I thought of them), waiting to be put to work. The little clerk had the key, or a key, and he opened the door without being asked. We all then crowded inside. There was a gas lamp, which Sampson lit with a match, immediately turning it to the lowest setting. The room was somewhere between an office and a workshop. There was a desk, a metal cabinet, boxes of papers; boxes of engine bits. I made out some corks for oil pots, an old whistle, tins of screws. A smaller version of one of the shed's church windows was set into the back wall, and in the corner was the safe. It was about four foot high, with a metal crest on the front showing a lion and a snake in a tangle. Woven in between them was a ribbon on which appeared the words 'Croft and Son', and then something in Latin that probably meant: 'If you think you're going to break into this bugger, think on'. There was an ordinary lock, an American lock, I thought – a knob that you turned to find certain numbers. It was the opposite case to that of the Lost Luggage Office, in that they'd obviously not been able to find, or buy, the man who held the key or knew the numbers.
Sampson and the young fellow were now putting their boots to the top of the very dignified safe, and kicking it over. It fell on its back with a mighty crash, making matchwood of the desk chair on its way.
'Can we not bring it away?' said Hopkins, looking on. 'We're right underneath the fucking window.'
Sampson pointed at me, 'Fetch us a tarpaulin, won't you?' all friendliness quite gone, for now the business was under way in earnest.
I went out into the darkness of the shed, and Hopkins followed, although he then diverted away towards the shed mouth. Had he reckoned on me bolting? I walked between the locomotives. There was a Class R… also a Q Class, with its weird glass roof let into the cab top – that would give you a view of the clouds going in the opposite direction as you ran along. From the shed mouth, Hopkins was watching me as I looked at the engines. I fancied he knew that I was able to see them for what they were.
I saw a tarpaulin: folded over the boiler of a tank engine, like a horse blanket. I yanked it down, making a cloud of dust and muck; and a black lace was left dangling from my fingers: a cobweb. The sight of the thing checked me: I had given nothing but aid to this operation so far, and every new piece of assistance I gave made me less of a detective and more of a burglar. I wiped away the cobweb, and hauled the tarpaulin towards the little office. Hopkins closed with me as I did so, and I looked past him, beyond the shed mouth where – five hundred yards off – a figure was walking towards one of the cabins set between the tracks. Company man on a late turn. He might've had his hands in his pockets. At the same time I heard another train come rattling up, but it didn't go by the shed mouth.
Hopkins followed me into the crowded little room, where the cylinders – big man and little man – stood in place. Lengths of rubber tubing were now connected to the taps on their tops, and these came together in the brass blowpipe that rested in Sampson's hands. It was a double gun, able to mix the two gases.
'Put that against the window,' he ordered when he saw me with the tarpaulin, so I moved around the desk. The thing was pretty stiff, and stood up of its own accord. I made a kind of cone of it, and it shut out the window pretty well.
'Good-o,' he said, so I'd got points for that, as well as everything else.
With stout leather gloves now on his hands, Sampson was removing his hat, putting on a pair of goggles. They were like the eye shades sometimes worn by the blind but they gave Sampson the look of one who could see everything, just as though they were a pair of giant black eyes. He had not troubled to protect his suit, which surprised me.
'Let's have the acetylene,' he said, looking at all of us at once. But it was the young man who answered the command. Taking his wrench or spanner he turned a nut on the smallest cylinder; there came a low whoosh, and Sampson lit a match, and put it to the end of the blowpipe. But the rushing gas simply blew it out. He tried again with a second match, obtaining the same result.
'Well I'd say you need a flint,' said the little clerk. 'You can't blow a spark out, you know,' he said, addressing me for some reason, 'instead of going out, it just blows away.'
Sampson turned his weird, goggle eyes towards the clerk.
He tried again with a third match. No go. I supposed that the room must be filling rapidly with the gas. It smelt like onions… fried onions.
Sampson tried a fourth match, and this one did the job, only the result was a let-down: a weak, ragged orange flame with a good deal of smoke into the bargain. I had expected the flame to be white, like the cylinder from which it came.
Sampson took a step to one side in surprise as the oxygen came, for the roaring increased ten fold, and the flame changed in an instant, both narrowing and lengthening into the shape of a sword. It was also now blue, and the young man at the cylinders was shouting over the roar: 'It's the light blue at the heart of it that does the cutting, mate.'