The Titanic Secret Read Online Free PDF Page A

the left shoulder, the impact spinning him just enough for the round fired from the shotgun to miss both Tremayne and the girl.
    Before the man could correct his aim and fire the second barrel, Tremayne pulled the trigger again, and then again. The man tumbled backwards, the first bullet smashing into his cheek and blowing off the back of his head, the second thudding into his chest.
    Claire was still screaming, the noise piercing through Tremayne’s head.
    ‘Hush, now,’ he said. ‘You are sure that there were only three of them?’
    He had to repeat the question twice before she finally stopped screaming and answered him.
    ‘Three, yes, there were three of them.’
    Tremayne stepped over the body of the first man he’d shot and entered the parlour.
    ‘I’m putting you down for just a few moments,’ he said. ‘There’s something I have to do before we go outside.’
    Claire nodded but didn’t reply as Tremayne lowered her gently to the wooden floor of the room. Then he opened his revolver again, removed the spent cartridge cases and reloaded it. It wasn’t that he disbelieved what the girl had told him. It was just that he always believed in being prepared. And with six bullets in the chamber of the Webley, he felt able to face whoever – or whatever – was waiting outside.
    ‘Now we’re leaving,’ he said, took Claire’s hand and led her out of the parlour and across to the main door of the farmhouse, extinguishing the hall light as he did so. He opened the door a few inches, and for a couple of minutes he just looked outside the building into the deepening gloom of the dusk. He heard a rustle in the undergrowth a few yards away, and then saw a fox step cautiously out onto a patch of grass before moving away on its nightly quest for food.
    That was enough for Tremayne. Foxes were highly sensitive to the presence of human beings, and now he was certain that no danger lurked outside the farmhouse.
    Just over four hours later, a few minutes before midnight, Tremayne knocked on the door of a flat in central London. It was opened almost immediately by a tall, solidly built man with grey hair and piercing eyes. He exuded an unmistakable air of command, which was entirely unsurprising given that he was a captain in the Royal Navy, though his current command was about as divorced from the sea and ships as it was possible to be. George Mansfield Cumming was the head of the Foreign Section of the recently formed Secret Service Bureau, a spy-master rather than a sailor.
    ‘Good evening, Mansfield,’ Tremayne said, and gave Claire a gentle push in the back.
    She needed no second bidding. She rushed over to Cumming and grasped him round the waist.
    ‘Uncle George,’ she murmured, holding him tight. ‘I’m so glad I’m here.’
    Cumming smiled down at her and ruffled her hair, then bent down and gave her a hug.
    ‘You’re not hurt?’ he asked, directing his question at the girl, but actually looking up at Tremayne for the answer.
    ‘I don’t think they touched her,’ he said, ‘apart from just manhandling her when they needed to. But no funny business, if you know what I mean.’
    ‘Where are they?’
    ‘At the farmhouse, stiffening up and attracting flies,’ Tremayne replied shortly. ‘And there were three of them, by the way, not two as we’d thought.’
    Cumming nodded. ‘I’ll have a quiet word with the people who need to know,’ he said, ‘and I think we’ll probably write the whole thing off as a burglary that went wrong.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Tremayne said. ‘Do you want me to hang on to the pistol or give it back?’
    ‘I’ll take it,’ Cumming replied. ‘It can go back in the armoury.’
    Tremayne removed the revolver from his pocket, broke it to remove the shells and then placed it on the occasional table on one side of the hall. He took out the cardboard box which contained the ammunition, added the six rounds to it and then felt around in his pocket for the unfired round he’d