Conan Doyle removed his hat and spoke in a firm, but diplomatic tone. “Mister Arkwright, I am Arthur Conan Doyle and this is my friend, Oscar Wilde.”
There were few names in British society of equal fame, but it was obvious the master engineer was completely clueless. “Who? Never bloody heard of you. State your business and then kindly bugger off!”
“It’s about the fog, sir,” Wilde put in — rashly, it turned out.
At the mention of the word fog the large Yorkshire engineer grew apoplectic.
“Oh, I’ve seen you bloody London types before! Are you come here to dun me about the smoke my factories release? Ignorance, gentlemen. Mindless piffle! London sits on marshland through which a great river runs. There have been London fogs since Roman times. The puny efforts of man have no effect whatsoever upon the climate.”
Rather inadvisably, Wilde chose to argue the point. “But surely it must have some effect. When I smoke in my carriage it fogs the air dreadfully and my wife upbraids me. Of course, I simply must smoke as it is vital to the creative process, and yet still she complains.”
“Your analogy is baseless,” Arkwright sneered. “The interior of a carriage is a tiny space. By comparison the atmosphere is as vast and limitless as the oceans. Besides, do you know what that smoke represents?”
“Black lung?” Conan Doyle ventured; the man’s rudeness had got his dander up. “Respiratory distress, inflammation of the bronchioles, emphysema—”
“Work, sir! Work. Employment. Commerce. The creation of wealth for all. Food on the table for my workers. Employment for colliers. For coal merchants. Warmth for the hearths of millions. Baked bread to feed hungry bellies. A bloody small price to pay for an occasional smudge of soot on a fine gentleman’s starched collar.”
Conan Doyle let the Yorkshireman rant on until he, at last, paused for breath. “I’m afraid my friend misspoke. We have not come to discuss fog, but to discuss the Fog Committee.”
For a moment, a look of fear flashed across Ozymandius’s face before a fierce light burned hot in the gray eyes, a muscle quivered in the implacable jaw.
“Enough!” he barked, silencing Conan Doyle with a look. For the first time, he seemed aware of his draftsmen and a roomful of eavesdropping ears. He nodded toward a door at the end of the room. “Not here,” he said and added curtly, “Follow.”
They struggled to keep up with the industrialist, who walked with a distance-devouring stride, along first one corridor and through a door, followed by a second and then a third. With each doorway they passed through, the din of machinery grew steadily louder. Arkwright paused at a final door and flung it open. They stepped into a factory where the air vibrated with a percussive cacophony of pounding steam hammers, shrieking saws, and the roar of mighty steam engines turning enormous wheels, the brassy arms of their giant connecting rods pulverizing the air with each dizzy revolution. Dwarfed by the machines, men in overalls beetled about the factory floor, wrenching on giant beam engines, their faces runneling sweat, while women and children hunched over belt-driven machines with spinning wire brushes they used to polish shiny brass cogwheels. Once finished, they dropped the parts into baskets at their feet. When the growing pile threatened to overflow onto the floor, the baskets were hefted by other workers, loaded onto iron wheeled carts, and dragged away.
“Say what you have to say and be bloody quick about it,” the industrialist snarled, as he strode quickly across the factory floor. “I’m a busy man who earned his fortune through hard graft. Not a gentleman who idles his day away over cups of tea and the day’s newspapers. Time is money and I have none to fritter.”
“The other night, you almost ran over our carriage on Piccadilly. Soon after, we encountered a strange man, more monster than man. That same night, Tarquin Hogg was assassinated.”
At Conan Doyle’s words, Ozymandius stopped short and glared at the two friends. “Who are you two? Who sent you to my door?”
But instead of answering, Conan Doyle drew out the shiny cogwheel from his pocket and held it up for Arkwright to see. At the sight of the cogwheel, the engineer’s eyes widened, his jaw clenched. He looked ready to burst into a fit of histrionics, but instead his shoulders slumped and he growled, “Follow me.”
They left the noise of the factory, weaved through a maze of offices, and finally stepped into a large and gloomy space lined with bookcases bowing beneath collapsing piles of engineering texts — Arkwright’s private office. As they entered the room, the engineer crossed to his enormous desk and tossed a cloth over something he obviously did not want them to see. Conan Doyle hoped Wilde had also seen it, but the glimpse was so brief and the object so bizarre and out of keeping with the rest of the engineer’s business, later on he could not be certain of what he had truly seen.
One large window, dimmed by years of soot, looked out over a grimy rooftop to a row of smokestacks billowing clouds of carbon black. The walls of the office were hung with photographs of past triumphs: giant locomotives, iron bridges, steamships, colossal beam engines. The Yorkshireman gruffly gestured for them to take a seat in the two chairs set before his hulking desk while he paced the room, a man in perpetual motion. After the third circuit, he paused long enough to take a cigar from a wooden box. Seeming to remember his manners, he grudgingly thrust the box at his guests. After each took a turn with the cutter, the three men shared a quiet moment as they puffed their cigars into life.
A large framed photograph hung on the wall behind his desk: two gentlemen in matching stovepipe hats posing before a giant steam locomotive. The men had their arms draped about each other’s shoulders, a celebratory cigar clamped in their jaws. Ozymandius was the taller of the two, and shared a familial similarity with the shorter man — no doubt a brother. The photograph had been taken many years back, for both sported finely trimmed black beards devoid of a trace of gray.
Conan Doyle said nothing for several seconds. He took out the gearwheel and placed it upon Arkwright’s desk and asked, “Is it something of your manufacture? I was told by an expert that only an engineer of considerable talent could fashion such a piece.”
Arkwright stood looking down at the shiny metal gear, his jaw clenching. Finally, he could resist no longer and snatched it up, scrutinizing the object closely. He asked in an accusatory voice, “Where did you get this?”
“I found it in the house of Tarquin Hogg. It was part of a mechanical heart that had been implanted in the assassin’s chest. Someone is reanimating executed prisoners using these infernal devices and programming them to murder key figures in the government.”
“Whaaaaat?” The engineer exclaimed, his eyes widening. But then he shrugged it off and muttered, “Highly bloody fanciful!” and tossed the heavy metal gear back to Conan Doyle.
“So the piece is not of your manufacture?”
“I did not make it. It is not one of mine. Now good day to you gentlemen.”
“What about your brother?” Wilde spoke up for the first time. “The chap in the photo with you. Your partnership is obviously dissolved, as evidenced by the statue you had amended. Could your brother not have fashioned it?”
“My brother, sir, is dead.”
“Dead?” Conan Doyle echoed.
The industrialist seemed to go into a trance, his glassy stare fixed on something from long ago in the past. “An accident. Ten years ago. We made weapons back then: machine guns, cannons, bombs. My brother had an idea for a revolutionary new weapon: a steam torpedo. But no ordinary torpedo — a guided torpedo. A device possessed of a degree of autonomy. It was meant to be a war-winner — an unstoppable weapon that would seek out and destroy enemy ships from a great distance. We thought we had perfected it, but…” His voice shriveled and he shook his head scornfully. The engineer turned his back on them and stared fixedly at the framed portrait on the wall. “It worked flawlessly in tests. But on the day of the demonstration, in front of the queen, the admiralty, and all the bloody world, it went terribly wrong. The torpedo missed the target, ran ashore, and crashed into the reviewing stand.” He shook his head at the painful memory. “Dozens were killed… including my brother’s wife and son.”