The Aquila Project Read Online Free PDF Page B

arrived, but there was plenty to see. Aldermen and sheriffs, mayors wearing their gold chains of office, exotic foreigners in peculiar clothing – all these, and more, arrived in a steady stream.
    Box would be stationed on the roof of Carmody’s Wool Depot by now. If there was anything untoward to see, then Box would see it. Sergeant Knollys would be under the southern approach road, adding his very considerable weight to the posse of police provided for the day by Denis Neylan. Surely nothing could go amiss? This Grunwalski was almost certainly acting alone. And in any case, what possible effect could a single bomb in the boiler room have upon the massive triumph of engineering rising giddily above them to the sky? The man was a lunatic….
    The next hour passed swiftly, and the assembled audience amused themselves by watching notables as they arrived, importantly late, in order to create a stir. Here was Mr Asquith, the Home Secretary. There was the Bishop of London.
    At last the Royal Procession arrived. (Had they seized Grunwalski yet? Was the bridge safe?) The carriages crossed the bridge, and passed out of sight. It seemed an age before they returned, the train of vehicles halting at the dais prepared for the Prince and his suite. At last, the formal opening of the new bridge was about to begin.
    The Prince of Wales took up a position in front of the mechanism that would operate the bridge machinery. It had been fancifully disguised as a loving-cup standing on an ornate pedestal. The Recorder of London began to read an interminable and inaudible speech, its words carried away on the breeze, and drowned very effectively by the continual cheering of the crowds. The Prince of Wales read an equally inaudible reply, and thenslowly turned the valve that would operate the hydraulic mechanism .
    Immediately the two massive leaves of the carriageway, each 115 feet in length, began to move upwards. There came a blast of trumpets, a wild crescendo of steam whistles from the boats thronging the river, and, behind all the popular clamour, the booming of guns from the Tower of London.
    Mackharness, and the others occupying the seats in the pavilion fell silent as the divided roadway rose majestically and noiselessly into the air until each section blocked the archway of its respective tower. A thunder of cheering rose into the summer sky, and almost immediately a triumphant procession of flag-draped vessels began to pass under Tower Bridge.
     
    There was an hour to spare before Box was due back at King James’s Rents for a prearranged meeting with Sergeant Knollys, ample time for him to take a cab and visit his old father at his premises in Oxford Street. Toby Box had joined the Metropolitan Police in 1840, at the age of twenty-one, and had risen to the rank of sergeant. He’d always been a uniformed man, a divisional man, not a detective, like his son.
    In 1875, Toby Box had been shot in the leg by a villain called Joseph Edward Spargo, a man who was later hanged for murder. There had followed eighteen years of suffering and the threat of total immobility, and towards the end of ’92 the possibility of gangrene had been mooted. Toby Box’s leg had been amputated at the Royal Free Hospital in Grey’s Inn Road early in January 1893.
    And now, after eighteen months’ convalescence, old Mr Box had come home to Oxford Street. He had learnt to walk with his new leg, and was determined to assume his normal life as proprietor of Box’s Cigar Divan and Hair-Cutting Rooms, a tall and narrow shop a few yards further on from the Eagle public house, just before you came to the turn into New Bond Street.
    As Box came into Oxford Street, he saw the Viking’s landau,with the beribboned black horse between the shafts, draw away from the pavement and join the stream of traffic moving slowly up the busy thoroughfare. He stopped underneath the awnings of Marshall and Snelgrove’s, which stretched low over the hot flags.
    What had the Viking