CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The History Museum was a converted carriage house off Prince Street, and by the time Ella and Ripley had crossed half of Alexandria to reach it and followed the chalkboard signs around to the courtyard at the back, the demonstration was almost over.
Ella smelled it before she saw it. Coal smoke hung over the courtyard, sweet and dirty at the same time, and under the smoke came the heat. Around forty people were standing in a horseshoe around a portable forge, including parents and a school group in matching yellow caps.
And at the open end of the horseshoe, behind a rope barrier and an anvil, stood Francis Hale.
Ella stopped at the back of the crowd and looked at him the way she’d been looking at him in her head for the past hour, and the first thing she had to do was adjust the picture.
He was big. There was no argument about that.
Francis Hale was six-four on a good day, perhaps a touch over it, and had width on his size too.
His chest strained the linen shirt he was wearing under his leather apron and he had forearms like dock rope where the sleeves were rolled back.
The forearms were the thing her eyes kept returning to, because the man in Brennan’s video had worn his sleeves rolled the same way.
Hale’s were burned in places, with old white scars and newer pink ones scattered from wrist to elbow.
But six foot four was not six foot eight.
‘Thoughts?’ Ripley asked. She’d taken up a position at Ella’s shoulder, both of them now playing the part of two more adults at the back of a school trip.
‘I’m thinking.’
‘Think louder.’
‘He’s big enough to do everything that was done.
Look at his hands.’ Hale had drawn a length of orange steel out of the coals with a pair of tongs, laid it across the anvil, and begun to work it.
His hammer banged in a rhythm so even it could have kept time for an orchestra.
‘He could take a head off in one swing. Strength isn’t the question. ’
‘Yeah, but the height looks off.’
‘The question is four inches.’
‘Same as with every man,’ Ripley said.
Ella watched Francis Hale and tried to do the thing she’d come here to do, which was to put the hood on him.
She built the picture piece by piece. She took the apron away and replaced it with the dark tunic from the video.
She pulled black cloth down over the heavy, square head – he was bald, or shaved, she couldn’t tell from here, with a short grey-flecked beard – and cut two holes in it, and stood him behind a seated man in an office with an axe raised over his head.
The picture took little work to come into focus.
The man in the video had the same physical cadence as the man hammering away in front of her, which was without waste and without hesitation.
Watching Hale fold the glowing steel back on itself, Ella understood that she wasn’t watching a performance at all.
The crowd was incidental. He’d be doing this identically if the courtyard were empty.
And yet she couldn’t help but question the missing four inches, although the short clip of the unsub couldn’t determine his exact height.
Cameras and doorframes distorted height.
She could argue Hale up to the figure in the video, just about, if she squinted.
She could also argue that the figure in the video would make Francis Hale look average, and that thought arrived with an unpleasant little drop in her stomach, because if Hale wasn’t her amateur executioner, then the executioner was still out there.
‘He talks like a tour guide,’ Ripley said.
He did, when he talked at all. Hale’s patter was sparse and dry.
‘The metal tells you when it’s ready,’ said Hale. ‘You just have to learn the colors. Orange can be forgiving, but yellow can’t. ‘Everything you’re looking at has been made this way for a thousand years. Nobody’s found a better one.’
A kid in a yellow cap put his hand up and didn’t wait to be picked. ‘Have you ever made a real sword?’
‘Loads,’ Hale said.
‘Could they kill someone?’
A few of the kids laughed. Hale carried the steel to the slack tub and quenched it, and the hiss filled the courtyard. ‘A sword is a tool. A tool does whatever the wielder decides to do.’
It wasn’t the answer the kids wanted, judging by their disappointed faces.
Ella asked Ripley, ‘How do you want to play it? We have the physical similarities and the threatening messages to Brennan to hold him with.’
‘We talk to him. He’s a businessman at a public event. I want to hear his voice up close and I want to see what his thumbs do when we say Brennan’s name.’
‘Sure. I’ll just watch every other body part, shall I?’
‘Yeah.’
The sarcasm clearly flew over Ripley’s head. Ella let it slide. She glanced over at the courtyard’s exits and spotted two possible escape routes, but she doubted Francis Hale could outrun her, unless his freak genetics also extended to his cardio abilities.
Hale set the finished piece – a fire poker, twisted along the shaft, made from raw bar in apparently a few minutes – on the anvil for the crowd to admire.
‘That concludes the demonstration,’ he said. ‘I’ll take questions at the rope. Nothing on the anvil gets touched until tomorrow. Steel holds its heat a lot longer than people believe.’
The horseshoe broke into applause and then into drift, the yellow caps funneling away towards the gift shop, a few parents lifting phones for photographs. Hale pulled off one glove with his teeth and began banking the coals, alone again the moment the clapping stopped.
‘Come on. Let’s go talk to him.’
The closer Ella got, the bigger Hale became. He was banking the last of the coals when her shadow fell across the anvil, and he looked up.
Hale clocked them for cops. She was sure of that. People who’d done nothing wrong looked at a badge with curiosity. People who’d done something looked at the person holding it.
‘Mr Hale?’ Ella showed the badge anyway. ‘Agent Dark, FBI. This is Agent Ripley. Could we have a couple of minutes?’
‘Sorry, I’m in the middle of packing up.
’ His voice was stripped of the patter. Up close, his beard was more grey than she’d thought, and there was a burn scar that ran from the corner of his mouth into the hair.
‘Is this about the museum? Because I have a permit for the forge. It’s filed with the county. ’
‘It’s not about the forge. You run Hale Forgeworks. You make replica blades, that sort of work. Is that correct?’
‘Correct. What’s this about?’
‘You also post on a forum called the Armory under the name Gallowglass.’
Hale gripped the tongs in his hand a little firmer. Coal smoke drifted between them and caught the back of Ella’s throat, and for a second neither of them said anything.
‘Yes, I do. I make no secret of it. Is that a crime now?’ Hale said.
‘No,’ Ripley said. ‘It isn’t. We’re talking to people who knew Curtis Brennan. You corresponded with him last year. Do you recognize the name?’
‘The guy from the Watchlist? Yes, of course. What about him?’
Ella glanced at her partner, who had her eyes on the suspect’s thumbs. Ella couldn’t identify a note of concern in her expression. ‘You haven’t read the news? Or been online?’
‘Not today,’ Hale said. ‘Why? What’s he done now?’
Ripley asked, ‘Have you spoken to him recently?’
‘I’ve never spoken to him, nor do I want to. A shallow man like that. We wouldn’t get along.’
Lying to a federal agent was a crime in itself, so Francis Hale had committed at least one felony in the past few days.
Hale continued, ‘Can you give me a moment? I didn’t drain the slack tub. The museum get funny about it, especially with kids in the other room. There’s a valve at the back.’
‘It’s not important right now, Mr Hale. All of the kids are gone. We can do this here.’
‘The museum will fine me. I won’t be a moment.’
Ella watched him cross to the equipment, and she felt the change in him before she could have named what it was; the looseness going out of his walk, the way his head came up and tilted, half an inch, toward the gap between the gift shop wall and the museum’s back door.
Hale bent over the tub. His hand went down behind it.
Then he ran.
For a man built like a loading door, Francis Hale moved well.
He came off the mark with his head down and his arms driving, and his sudden burst of animation drew the attention of everyone still lingering in the courtyard.
Ella’s body answered before the courtyard had finished tilting – her heart slamming up into her throat, the cold flood of it down her arms. Innocent men explained themselves.
They didn’t put their heads down and sprint for a gap in a wall.
‘Hale!’
Ella burst into a sprint, but only got three steps in before her eardrums became the victim of a 150 decibel blast. A giant, brass plaque, clearly hung for its medieval flavour, fell off its bracket and came down on the cobbles in front of Hale with a sound like a dropped engine block.
Hale screeched to a halt, then shot a look back at the agents like he was a deer-in-the-headlights waiting for the killing blow.
It was then that Ella saw the smoking Glock in Ripley’s hand.
‘Stay right there, Hale,’ Ripley shouted. She edged closer with her pistol trained on him, then gestured for Ella to get her cuffs out.
Ella obliged. She crossed the courtyard with her cuffs out. She watched Hale closely for another sign that he might flee.
Hale remained still. When Ella got closer, he raised his hands in surrender and said, ‘Fine. You got me.’