The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (18 page)

‘Teresa, now is not the time,’ said Lyle with a scowl.

Grinning, Tess wiggled a small bundle through the bars. It got about halfway through and then promptly seemed to take on a life of its own, bending inside its tight cloth wrapping so that a part of it attached itself very firmly to one of the iron bars near the hole. With great effort, Lyle hopped up and dragged it off only by the weight of his own body, pulling it free with a sharp
clack
. After that came three larger packets wrapped mostly in brown paper and string, with a little line of fuse trailing from one end of each. Tess said cheerfully, ‘So, when’ll you be wantin’ distraction? ’

‘Three a.m., stick to the time.’ A look of sudden guilt passed across Lyle’s face. ‘Oh dear, this is a long way past your bedtime, Teresa. Don’t get used to it!’

‘You sure three’s long enough?’

‘Teresa . . .’ growled Lyle in a warning voice.

‘Just sayin’, concern an’ that.’

‘Stick to the church bells,’ he repeated firmly.

‘All right! ’Byeee!’

With a final cheerful wave, Tess dropped from sight. She didn’t so much climb down the rope as lessen her grip at a strategic point. She whizzed down in a cloud of hair and flapping clothes, repressing the instinct to go ‘Wheee!’ and landing without a sound in a courtyard a long way below, lost in the fog.

Inside the cell Horatio Lyle, refusing to be rushed, methodically unwrapped his bundle of goods. Lock picks, hooks, magnets, mirrors, suspicious tubes and glassy spheres clinked under his fingertips.

Lyle chose a long hook and slotted a mirror on to it, took another hook and walked up to the door. He walked up to the viewing hatch, and smiled with an undeniable edge of smugness as one of his magnets stuck to the iron sheet with a resolute thump. He drew the magnet across, and the hatch went with it, opening up easily to reveal the corridor outside. He dropped the magnet into his pocket, stuck the mirror out on the hook and turned it until he could see the large iron bolt running across the door on the outside. Standing on tiptoe, he eased an arm out, the other hook in his hand, until the end of the hook caught on the bolt. In the mostly-darkness, lit only by the unreliable moonlight coming through the small window, it was as much an act of luck and touch as an exercise in matching the eye to workings of the hand. When the bolt came loose, it was with a
thunk
and a reluctant, badly oiled rattle that made his heart race in time to each uneven slide of the bolt. He counted to thirty to still his heart and wait for retribution to come - and when it didn’t he knelt by the lock on the inside of the door, and drew out Tess’s finest lock picks, the ones she had chosen specially from a wide collection, with the words, ‘Big doors . . . well, big doors need good tools, Mister Lyle . . .’ With a long sucking in of breath, Lyle set to work at the lock.

It was heavy work, rather than subtle - the springs inside the lock were few and crude, but stiff, and Lyle kept half-expecting his tools to fracture with the strain of it. The release of pressure when the lock finally went was, he thought for a moment, the pick snapping. Only the outward swing of the door at his careful push gave him grounds to breathe again. He rolled up his tools quickly and stepped into the darkness of the corridor. If anything lived or breathed, it hid it well.

Lyle began the long, careful plod towards the centre of the prison.

 

Nothing ever happened on the Caledonian Road to give it distinction. Sometimes the English going to Scotland or the Scots coming to England rattled down the Caledonian Road, sometimes the odd red lady was caught selling her wares towards the place where the railway terminated at King’s Cross. Sometimes barges blocked each other on the canal, but these days there was less traffic on the waterway as it was so much easier to send freight by train. The hoot of the locomotive’s whistle and the distant church bells were the only distraction, or the occasional wagon carrying prison inmates towards Portsmouth and a different kind of confinement.

Theoretically, Lyle was a copper through and through. Once the criminal was caught, justice was justice, and if justice chose to put away the guilty in a prison like Pentonville, then all well and good. The law might not be a marvel, it might not work exceptionally well; but it was the
law
, universal and impartial, and everyone had to stick to it, otherwise what was the point?

Tonight, however, it was secretly glad to be able to bring something different to the top of the Caledonian Road.

 

Voices outside the prison? Perhaps one or two inmates of Block Four are awake at three bells of the church, perhaps they have noticed something thud into the wall, perhaps that strange sense of hearing that develops in the absence of all other sound detects . . . somewhere down in the fog . . .

‘I said
that
one!’

‘You said
left,
Miss Teresa!’

‘Yes, there!’

‘Miss Teresa, we’ve had this problem before. Left is
that
way!’

‘Oh. Are you sure?’

‘Yes! I am completely and utterly confident that you said
that
fuse!
There!
’

‘Oh well, too late now . . .’

And the three boxes placed in the middle of the Caledonian Road, give a fizzle and a hiss, and promptly explode. They explode
upwards
, and they explode like fireworks. From the warden’s office to the outer gate to the topmost cell to the lower kitchens, the walls and ceilings of the prison light up an explosion of green, white, blue, red and sodium orange with the reflected light from the rockets. The noise fills every cell, rattles every window pane with the shrieks of the screamers climbing up and the hiss of the candles and spitting of sparks as they fizzle gently out on their way back into the fog and the boom of the big bangers as they reach the top of their flight and rupture outwards. And as they explode, they shower sparks that glow like dying fireflies as they fall, and they spew smoke that settles above the fog, in the fog, blending with the fog, the lights from the explosions somehow made out-of-focus by the haze, the grey smoke distinguishable by a sharper, sweeter smell as it begins to settle.

 

Inside the prison, Horatio Lyle looked up and smiled as the first bangs shook through the floor, and the first doors started clanging and the first voices started shouting. With intricate care he drew out the three paper-wrapped packages from his bundle of goods, struck a match off the wall and set the fuses burning. He threw the first down one corridor, tossed the second into another and, with a gleeful sense of satisfaction, chucked the final one into the main hall where the stretched-out wings of the prison joined. He counted to five, and heard the
hiss-bang
of the first package igniting, and grinned as from each corridor and hallway thick billows of smoke started to roll across the floor.

It took ten minutes for the panic to set in satisfactorily. Thomas was surprised by that: he had expected the reaction to be prompt. But then, in the fog and the smoke and the darkness, his own hand in front of his face had taken on a strange, drained, featureless aspect, a fuzzy outline in the dark - and such a complete darkness as he had never experienced. What little moonlight there had been from above was now lost; there was nothing even to cast a deeper shadow. Somehow the busyness behind his eyes, when he closed them, was brighter than the utter black of the smothered night outside. At least behind his eyelids imagination could fill in sparks and colours where there was nothing else. But outside, with everything smelling of smoke and the acrid whiff of gunpowder residue, the rising sounds of shouting and bells ringing in the prison, left all too little space for imagination.

He called out, his voice muffled in the darkness, ‘Tess?’

A little voice somewhere in the night - up, down, it all had lost meaning - replied, ‘Bigwig?’

‘I can’t see anything.’

‘That were the whole point, bigwig. Just keep talkin’ some, all right?’

‘I can see well enough.’ The voice came from close by Thomas’s ear and made him jump. He peered into the night and even though the darkness smothered all sense, he could still
feel
her bright green eyes looking at him. ‘It’s a beautiful night,’ murmured Lin Zi.

Somewhere in the dark Thomas could hear rising voices, a strange, far-off cacophony of orders and commands. A bell started ringing, a loud, insistent peal, cutting across the babble of voices.

‘What’s going on?’ hissed Tess’s voice off to his right.

‘I imagine,’ said Lin, ‘they’re calling out the guard.’

‘And that’s a good thing?’

‘Panic, confusion - yes, I think it may be good, if used right.’

‘An’ how’s that, then?’

You could hear the smile in Lin’s voice. ‘I may go and say hello.’

 

Even with his eyes streaming from the smoke, Lyle strode through the prison with the confident look of a man who belongs here and knows it and you’d better not question it any time soon, thank you very much. He could hear voices and bells ringing and doors banging and feet running, but with visibility down to a yard or two in every direction and more smoke gushing every second from the paper cylinders he’d thrown into the hallways, he didn’t care. Whenever he saw another figure moving, he pressed himself into the shadows and waited for it to pass. The noise was a relief: every shout, every bang, every reverberation gave a reference point for where there was life and activity, something to avoid. It was far better to know that someone was awake and out there looking for you than to pad along in the silence of uncertainty. He didn’t need much light to find where he was going - the few long matches he struck and held up to create a pool of light about his own width were enough - he just needed to go down, and keep going down. In many ways his destination made it easier - coughing and blundering through the smoke, the warders were doing their best to establish a perimeter, armed with batons and truncheons, to hinder would-be escapees. The thing they were not trained to prevent was people trying to break in.

Outside the prison, the guards were surprised by a number of things. First was the absence of any kind of prison riot. Smoke billowed into the courtyard from the windows, rolling into the fog - but no cell doors were unlocked and, though the prisoners shouted and screamed and coughed and banged their bowls on the metal doors to create a clamour of scrapes and wallops that drowned out all human voices, no one who wasn’t a prison guard emerged from the darkness coughing black phlegm.

Second was the absence of fire. The smoke was dirty and stank of charcoal and burnt toast, but the guards running through the corridors with their buckets and sticks could find no glimmer of light to suggest an open flame as they tripped over each other’s feet and tumbled down stairways and into walls, feeling and fumbling their way through the darkness by guess-work alone.

The last thing that took some warders by surprise was the least probable of all. Milling in the dark, looking for another shadow to give commands or establish order, trying to strike lights to their lanterns and shouting out, ‘Who’s there? What’s there? Hello?’ some noticed sharp sounds, like a singer’s intake of breath before the final song and, turning from the group, looked into a pair of bright green eyes.

‘Hello,’ said Lin Zi. ‘Will you dance?’

 

Below ground level, Lyle’s fingers groping through the dark found the door he was looking for. It wasn’t a particularly exciting door, and when the lock clicked under pressure, it led to a not very interesting flight of stairs dropping further down into darkness - pure darkness, not a trace of smoke except that which drifted in with Lyle: the utter darkness of a windowless space made of very thick brick. Lyle kicked the staircase thoughtfully - it hummed with iron. He ran his hand across the wall - it was cold and metallic. Smiling, he closed the door behind him, and reached into his bundle of goods for a couple of the long glass tubes Tess had brought him. He tipped a liquid from one on to a small stock of powder at the bottom of the other, shook gently and held it well away from his face. With a
phuzz
-
hiss
the mixture started to glow, giving off a thin white steam and an angry noise as the little parts of the powder bubbled up and down like pebbles in a storm. By this dim light, Lyle picked his way down the metal staircase, on to the metal floor below, past the silent metal furnaces with their pipes and coal-black open doors, and across a room at the far side of which a metal door sat with the foreboding look of a door not intended to be opened by those who Did Not Know. Underneath it, however, Lyle could see a faint orange light. He walked over, took a deep breath, and hammered on the door.