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Mr Ambrose gave me a look. ‘It has nothing to do with rank, Mr Linton. In fact, I am masquerading as a simple soldier. One simply has to act as if one has no doubt that people will do as one wishes. In most cases, that will take them by surprise so much that they forget to refuse. Now come.’
He started down the corridor, and I had already taken the first two steps after him before I realized what I was doing.
One simply has to act as if one has no doubt that people will do as one wishes. In most cases, that will take them by surprise so much that they forget to refuse.
For a moment, I considered refusing, just for the fun of it. But then, I sighed and shook my head. Now wasn’t the time.
We continued down the corridor. At more or less regular intervals, we came upon metal doors set into walls that seemed to serve no particular purpose.
‘Bulkheads,’ Mr Ambrose said when I asked about them. ‘Walls separating the ship into smaller compartments. They normally just serve the purpose of giving the vessel more structure and stability. But these look to be watertight. In the event of a cannonball penetrating the outer hull, the door can be closed and the ship can fight on as if practically nothing happened. It’s the first time I’ve seen something like this in a warship.’
His words sent a cold shiver down my spine. I bit my lip to contain my anxiety.
‘Where are we heading, exactly?’ I asked.
‘Nowhere. The ship is not very large. To judge by eye, I would say a length of eighty-four feet, and maybe a draught of six or seven feet. We are going to search it from top to bottom until we find the file. Then we are going to leave.’
‘Don’t you think that plan might be a little simplistic?’
‘No.’
And that was it. I didn’t get another word out of him. We marched through dark, dank corridors of steel, now and then opening a door to the left or the right to spy into a tiny steel compartment. They all held crates of different shapes and sizes. Apparently, Mr Ambrose’s file wasn’t the only thing Lord Dalgliesh was eager to get out of the country.
Finally, we came to a junction where the corridor split into two.
‘Should we split up?’ I asked, keeping my voice down. I thought I could hear the faint mumbling of voices somewhere, and they had better not hear us.
Mr Ambrose shook his head.
‘Smell that?’ He pointed down one corridor. ‘That way smells of oil and smoke. The engine room will be down there. Lord Dalgliesh would never keep such sensitive papers anywhere near a burning fire. Let’s go this way.’
And he started down the other corridor. By now, I had long lost any sense of direction. I only hoped that Mr Ambrose would be able to find the way out again. He certainly seemed confident enough. But then, he always did. Even when, after checking three more storage rooms, we ran smack into a dead end.
Mr Ambrose stopped. He stood there for a moment. His left little finger twitched, once.
‘All right. Let’s turn around. I think there was another junction not too far back. We can-’
He cut off, as voices came down the corridor.
‘…everything been stored down here?’
‘Yes, everything, apart from these last few sacks.’
Abruptly, Mr Ambrose leaned down to my ear. ‘Stay calm.’ His voice was quiet, cool, assured. He must have seen the fear on my face. ‘We will just walk past them. Remember, those are soldiers, just like us. We can simply walk past them.’
‘And the men didn’t open a single crate or sack?’ the voice in the distance asked.
‘Yes, Lord Dalgliesh,’ the other answered.
Beside me, Mr Ambrose stiffened.
‘Just soldiers?’ I hissed, my voice trembling more than I would have liked.
He moved more quickly than I could have believed possible. In a moment, he had flung open the door to my left and pushed me into the dank little room. There was hardly enough space for me there; most of it was taken up by a giant wooden crate, over eight feet high. Slamming his cane between the lid and the walls, he heaved. The lid popped open.
‘What-’ I began. But before I could finish my sentence or take a closer look at the contents of the crate, I was lifted up by a pair of hard, powerful arms and thrown not very ceremoniously into the wooden container.
The fact that I landed face-first in wood wool muffled the string of unladylike curses that came from my lips, and probably saved my life. From outside, I could hear shuffling feet.
‘Where do you want the sacks, Your Lordship?’ I heard a gruff sailor’s voice from somewhere outside.
‘Over there.’
‘Yes, Your Lordship.’
The steps outside approached our little room. A moment later, something heavy landed on top of me, forcing the air out of my lungs, and the lid slammed shut above me. Gasping for breath, and getting only more wood wool, I reached up to shove aside whatever was suffocating me. But it was too hard and heavy to shift. Hell’s whiskers, what was it? Was Lord Dalgliesh already in the room, and had his men thrown a sack on top of me, without bothering to look into the crate? My hands reached out, touching, and I felt something bulging under rough cloth. A sack of potatoes, maybe?
My hand reached further up. There, the cloth ended, and my fingers touched something softer. It didn’t feel like a potato. It was oval and seemed to have some sort of hole in the middle…
‘Mr Linton,’ I heard a low voice from right above me, ‘kindly take your finger out of my ear!’
Danger! Explosive Cargo!
My finger froze in mid-movement. Outside, I could hear footsteps passing the door of our room. Lord Dalgliesh and his cronies had heard nothing, were not coming to investigate. But right now, I couldn’t have cared less what they did or did not do. Turning my head to get my face out of the wood wool, I looked up, but saw only darkness. Mr Ambrose must have pulled the lid of the crate shut over us.
Mr Ambrose, who at present was lying right on top of me!
No! Don’t think about it! That’s not Mr Ambrose on top of you! It can’t be! It’s a sack of coals, or potatoes, or…
His cool breath tickled my cheek. He moved in a way no sack of potatoes could ever move. A sack of potatoes wasn’t as hard as this. A sack of potatoes didn’t have muscles that, even through the fabric between us, pressed forcefully into me. A sack of potatoes most certainly couldn’t make me shiver all over like this!
It’s the cold, I screamed at myself. You’re shivering because it’s cold in here! That’s all!