Chapter 1. The Demonic Locomotive
1:
The story of the death of Sir Martin Malprelate acquired, from its earliest telling, a phantasmagorical quality, shrouding the violence of the assault in an embellishment of diabolic spectres and uncanny mystery. Strip it down to the bare facts and what did we have? One old man, beaten to death, on a night of freezing fogs, in November. A tale deplorable in itself, and deplorably common in this age of ours – concerning which, pressed between iron and stone, I do not need to elaborate.
The story of this killing became tangled up with the story of the railway the man himself was building: or say rather, the railway he was forcing through the material tissue of London, into its very heart. Nor was Sir Martin possessed of friends to decry his posthumous fabulation. An unbenevolent man, grasping, assertive, an individual who put his enormous wealth into the service of only that wealth’s further augmentation. A miser, a skinflint, wealthy but sour, selfish and solitary.
No-one could gainsay his energy, of course, even in his eighth decade alive. He was often to be seen, stalking along the London streets (for he rarely travelled by carriage, and never rode the locomotives he was so instrumental in bringing into the town), his walking stick rapping a lively tattoo on the pavement. He possessed a head of superior size, whose mottled baldness gave it the appearance of an egg of one of the rarer birds. Sir Martin’s nose was sharp as a thorn, and his eyes large and always in motion. His mouth, however, rarely moved from a thin, spirit-level slit across the narrows of his lower face, and on those rare occasions when it curled into a smile it was nothing warming.
His heart was not altogether hardened, it must be said. There was softness in that organ, sensitivity and feeling: but it expended itself upon the animal kingdom, rather than the tribes of his fellow humans. He who could look without a quiver on a suffering man, a begging creditor, a man ruined and expelled, could not stand to see a horse beaten. He hoarded his money, and was as sharp at interest and accumulation as any in London, yet he patronized the new London Zoological Gardens with remarkable generosity.
Malprelate had, some decades earlier, made much money from the buying and selling of stock. Since nobody exactly knew his provenance or family, rumour filled the gap with lurid conjecture. His first notability came just at that time the Stock Exchange moved premises, from a Coffee House in Threadneedle Street to the purpose-built edifice in Capel Court and Shorter’s Court. Rumour, that cackling bird, says that Martin, perhaps still too poor, or perhaps simply disinclined to furnish such financial stringencies, evaded the requirements by a combination of bribery and blackmail. That is to say: he did not act in the manner of a gentleman.
Three years later he was worth £70,000.
From here, his tireless energy of acquisition, combined with a perfect and merciless rigidity when it came to calling-in debts, propelled Sir Martin to greater and greater wealth. He bought himself a fine Mayfair house, though the outward ostentation of its marble façade was not matched by the disorder and Gothic excesses reputed to prevail in the interior. Judicious dispensation of funds bought him the use of a number of Members of Parliament, as well as a change of surname and soon after a baronetage. He dealt stocks, and he lent money. He bought and sold property. When the railways first came he saw immediately the fiduciary possibilities in the developments they would necessitate. He created the Middlemarch Grand Congruence Railway Company and prosecuted the acquisition of land necessary for its construction with vigour and without ruth.
To Camden, north of Regent Park – in which locality he was fated to die his bizarre and mysterious death – Sir Martin was an earthquake. Where residents were prepared to sell their land to him, he drove down the price with a specie of bullying negotiation he had perfected over many years. Where residents were reluctant to sell, he used his Parliamentary influence to have Acts passed that compelled the sale, and when these were challenged in the courts he did not scruple to have ruffians harass and intimidate the litigants. If that did not discourage them, he would deliver discrete bribes to the sitting judges.
In his last weeks alive he was often seen in that neighbourhood stomping up and down, surveying the ruin he had made: houses dismantled, streets torn open after the manner of a butcher operating upon a carcass. Enormous heaps of red London clay had been thrown up beside new trenches. In amongst this chaos of carts coming and going – past stacks of iron rails rusting purple in the rain – marching past half-built bridges like a bishop’s crook rendered gigantic in stone – glancing down thoroughfares that were wholly impassable, stalking his way past the Babel towers of chimneys and fragments of unfinished walls and wildernesses of bricks, Sir Martin went. He looked into every detail of the works personally. He rebuked and chivvied the labourers. He snarled at the residents when they came out to complain.
The night he died he attended a resident’s committee, held in the meeting room of a local inn and attended by a great many such irate Camdenites. Sir Martin plocked-in as the clock struck the hour – for he was always a precisely punctual man – attended only by his personal secretary, Aster. For a full hour Sir Martin took questions; or, rather, batted questions away, flourished his walking stick. He snarled and sneered. He insulted the character and manhood of the Camden residents, and mocked them for opposition to progress.
At the end of this meeting Sir Martin blankly refused to leave until he could walk out as the very last man. And so he sat himself on a chair, with his legs wide and his hands resting on his walking stick between them, staring directly ahead as, one by one, local individuals approached him, some pouring contumely furiously upon him, others begging and pleading piteously, but all washing like waves against the implacable and immoveable rock of Sir Martin, seated.
Eventually everyone else left, and Sir Martin remained alone in the hall, save for Aster. He remained for a time in that room serenaded by the hissing of the gas lighting. Then he stood up, told Aster to return to Mayfair and wait for him there, and strode out for one last survey of the on-going works.
Work continued long after sunset, lit by tapers that struggled to push their light through the chilly integuments of winter fog that wrapped themselves around every torch and every person. Workmen swung their picks and hoisted their shovels. They moved barrows full of dirt one way, or brought barrows full of bricks the other. And past them all Sir Martin stomped, stopping from time to time to criticize the energy, or the expertise, of this or that man. They all knew him, and they all knew better than to answer back. A man with a suitcase – perhaps a doctor, carrying a surgeon’s bag – stopped on his way along the Camden streets to look down upon the old man walking the valley his men and money had made.
Now it was that Sir Martin approached his last moments alive.
He walked (the witnesses were all clear about this) alone, leaving the better-lit portion of the works to make his way down the corridor of opened land that his company had driven through the midst of what had once been houses and gardens, shops and workshops, schools and churches. Those domiciles spared by the destruction looked on mournfully from either side at the tongue of naked territory separating them.
Sir Martin walked on. The fog swirled as high as his waist, and the three-quarters moon cast a leper-white light upon the bank of mist, reflecting itself back upon his upper body and visage and giving him a spectral, uncanny appearance.
Then, one of two things happened.
If you live in the world of facts, you will believe a mob of disaffected men rushed Sir Martin and beat him down – perhaps angry Camdenites, perhaps workers aggrieved at his exacting and punitive employment, perhaps friends of one of the many labourers who had lost their lives in the oft dangerous work of building this railway line. Or perhaps some other group: anarchists, Reform radicals, foreigners. The police, who are constrained to investigate crime under the rubric of possibility and logical coherence, and who are now going from house to house, from worker’s tent to tent asking questions: – they speculate that the attack was the result of some anarchist group, desperate men inspired by the dangerous ideas seeping through from the European mainland. For in this year of eighteen hundred and forty eight, revolution is raging like wildfire everywhere across the Continent. These men gathered (so the police speculate) waiting for their moment – then came running down the corridor of land whooping and yelling, lanterns swinging, cudgels at the ready.
But not every individual is constrained by possibility and logic. For some a wilder and terrifying truth lies behind Sir Martin’s death. And among such people we will find, if we enquire, the actual bystanders who witnessed the death.
For they say that they saw no mob of angry men. It was a train, they say they saw: a great spectral locomotive, gleaming pale green and with one headlight to the fore shining a hellish red as it ploughed through the fog. Those who actually witnessed the death swore, and could not be persuaded to forswear, that this great rolling engine appeared as if from nowhere – that its wheels rang suddenly and melodiously upon steel rails like a great bell – though no rails had, at that time, been laid – that tonguing horns of red sparked from its firebox as its driver (no human creature) tossed-in shovelful after shovelful of hellblack coal – a fiery devil-train, thundering along by its own glare of light and lurid smoke.
The police, belonging to this other world, this realm of possibility and logic and material reality, pressed these witnesses to change their testimony. They would not. The witnesses were only relating, they insisted, what they saw.
And Sir Martin saw it as well! For he turned, and loosed a shout of pure terror – saw the red eye of the metal devil, bleared and in the mist, close upon him – and an instant later he was beaten down, caught up, and whirled away upon a jagged mill that spun him round and round, and struck him limb from limb, and licked his stream of life up with its fiery heat, and cast his mutilated fragments in the foggy air.
And then, say these witnesses, the train hurtled away, off into the night.
“But,” says Detective Inspector Bucket, his hands behind his back, and his head slightly to one side. “Where did it go to, this train you say you saw?”
His interlocutors do not wish to name the place towards which, they believed, it was travelling. Some of them shuddered in superstitious horror.
“The ground had been cleared,” said the Inspector. “Preparatory for the laying of railway track. But I walked there this very morning, and examined it under the bright light of a morning sun. No track has as yet been laid in that space. How could a locomotive proceed over the ground without rails?”
“No ordinary locomotive,” growled Foreman Williams. “An infernal, a spectral train.”
“Spectral enough to float impressionless over the red clay of north London,” noted the Inspector, “and yet substantial enough to break Sir Martin Malprelate’s body and crush out his life?”
The witnesses will not be talked round. They saw what they saw. “It went whence it came,” Foreman Williams insisted, “and it dragged that fellow’s soul down with it as it passed.”
Copyright © Adam Roberts with permission from Datura Books.
A gothic tale of murder and corruption set in 1840s Victorian London, taking inspiration from our most famous 19th century writers.
History, Politics and class collide in this suspenseful crime novel, following the death of a railway baron and the impact it has on the suffocated community.
Railway Baron, Sir Martin Malprelate of the 1840s, has been laying waste to the warren of Camden; buying up houses and clearing streets for his new railway line linking King’s Cross with the prosperous town of Middlemarch. He stands to make his fortune ever more vast and to earn the loathing of all who attempt to stand up to him.
Little wonder, then, that he meets a violent end on a foggy street after walking out of a particularly bitter meeting with outraged residents facing eviction. But the cause of his death causes more wonder. How could he have possibly fallen beneath the wells of a speeding spectral train running on tracks not yet even built?
Sir Martin’s death is investigated by the police, but the company employ one of its senior engineers, Mr Bryde, to pursue his own investigation. Bryde uncovers a network of resentment and conspiracy, agitating workers, scheming shareholders, corrupt politicians and a gallery of varied and grotesque characters – all of whom had some stake in the old man’s death.
Lacing it’s realism with both social commentary and the gothic imaginations of the time The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate is a vivid recreation of a London stalked by poverty and haunted by visions of demons and ghosts; a world of slums, lavish wealth and opium dens.
Mystery Private Eye [Datura Books, On Sale: November 14, 2023, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781915523020 / eISBN: 9781915523082]
Roberts has a degree in English from the University of Aberdeen and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University on Robert Browning and the Classics. He teaches English literature and creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Adam Roberts has been nominated three times for the Arthur C. Clarke Award: in 2001 for his debut novel, Salt, in 2007 for Gradisil and in 2010 for Yellow Blue Tibia. He won both the 2012 BSFA Award for Best Novel, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, for Jack Glass. It was further shortlisted for The Kitschies Red Tentacle award. His short story "Tollund" was nominated for the 2014 Sidewise Award. On his website, Roberts states that an ongoing project of his is to write a short story in every science fiction sub-genre.
In May 2014, Roberts gave the second annual Tolkien Lecture at Pembroke College, Oxford, speaking on the topic of Tolkien and Women.
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