Free The Quiet Death of Thomas Quaid: Lennox 5 by Craig Russell Page A

was kosher with this job.
    The gate rattled more than I had anticipated and I was glad to swing over the top and get my feet onto the roof of the watchman’s shed. I eased myself down and headed in the same direction the old guy had taken. During the war I’d become used to reading maps and plans, often in a hurry, and McNaught’s schematic of the works had stuck in my mind. Almost all the foundry’s site was built up with tight-packed, side-by-side worksheds: each brick-built and thirty feet wide and the same height with a pitched roof. Each workshed was stretched out long, some were three-quarters of the total width of the site and the only source of light came from the tented skylights along the roofs.
    Following the route along the ground that mirrored the one Tommy would have taken at roof level, I found myself in a narrow section that ran almost like a street between the blank brick sides of the worksheds. I could hear the sounds of heavy industry, but distant and muffled, and all of the sheds at this end of the foundry were silent and dark. Pulled back into the shadows, all my senses stretching out into the works, it was strange to listen to the dull throb of the place, like it was a living being. Every now and then the rumble would be punctuated by a bang or a clash of metal ringing out, muffled by the baffle of the foundry’s walls.
    The lighting was pretty meagre and widely spaced, affording me plenty of shadows. The odd thing was that what light there was came from the kind of lamp-posts I associated with Parisian boulevards: richly ornate iron standards with barley-sugar twists in the shaft and elaborate filigree brackets holding the lamp – itself a high-power bulb rather than a modern sodium light. I realized these lamps were more for display – examples of the foundry’s craft – and I reckoned they must have been here for forty years or more.
    The street between the sheds opened out suddenly into a large, better-lit square. Like a surreal arena in the midst of the industrial sheds, it had a massive bandstand at its centre. Iron looped and spiralled, burst into ferrous blossoms and arced up into the huge dome of the bandstand, which in turn rose above the tented rooftops of the foundry. The bandstand wasn’t alone: a few yards to its right was an equally impressive, if waterless, fountain; to its left, between two stone stanchions that were connected to nothing else, massive Art Deco gates stood guard over nothing. And all around these central exhibits were drinking fountains, pagodas, canopies, even French-style urinals, and, of course, telephone boxes – all ornately shaped out of iron. This was the foundry’s sales floor, where customers from across the Empire and around the world would examine the massive samples and place their orders for their parks, municipal spaces, rail stations or presidential palaces.
    Tommy had been right, this was a museum: the kind of grandiosity that belonged in the past, to an empire now dissolving, and probably to the time when Albert was still making Victoria go bug-eyed. But this was a new age of brutalist architecture and modernist lines: no one sought out the ornate any more; the shape of the future was being cast in concrete, not wrought in iron. Again the thought nagged at me: what kind of advanced technological or production secret could this place possibly be hiding from the world?
    I made my way along the edge of the display area towards the drawing office. It loomed up suddenly: a six-storey block, flat-roofed and the only new addition to the largely Victorian architecture of the foundry. The lighting was once again meagre and I understood why the elderly watchman made his rounds carrying a flashlight. Stumbling over an uneven cobble, I cursed out loud and nearly fell. I paused for a moment, annoyed at my own clumsiness, then made my way forward, keeping a steadying left hand on the wall. My reasoning was that if I made it to the main door of the building