The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (28 page)

‘I can’t make it work!’

‘You mean you
won’t
make it work. That, Mister Lyle, is something I am more than capable of rectifying.’

‘There is
nothing
you can do, Augustus. You can’t find
them
and
I
can’t fix it!’

‘Horatio,’ chided Havelock, ‘I am a man of greater means than you can even understand.’

 

At roughly this time, in the house of the senior Thomas Henry Elwick, Peer of the Realm, a window on the fifth floor very quietly went
click
. It was slid carefully upwards, a hand groped inside, and a voice beneath the hand muttered, ‘Get a move on, will you?’

‘You want my boot up your nose?’ was the delicate reply from the owner of the probing hand. There was a scrambling in the dark, and after a moment a man slipped through the open window on to the floor of the room. He was followed by another, then a third, each wriggling through the window like fish through a cranny in the rocks, all bending backs and flopping limbs.

One said, ‘Which first?’

‘The girl,’ replied another. ‘She’s more likely to scream.’

‘Mr Havelock said as how they weren’t to be damaged,’ pointed out the third. ‘He needs them, he said.’

‘He said as how they weren’t to be damaged
much
. Come on.’

The three slunk towards the door, opened it a crack, peered out. The corridor was empty except for a single, snoring footman, a bottle open by his side, head lolling against the wall, curled up on a stool too small for a man half his size. Ignoring him, they picked their way quietly down the corridor to the next door. It was locked. One pulled out a pair of lock picks from his coat pocket and set to quietly, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Another smelt the breath of the sleeping footman and wrinkled his nose in disgust. ‘Rum,’ he hissed.

‘So much for Lord Elwick’s staff,’ muttered another.

The lock clicked. They pushed the door back. The room beyond was shuttered and dark, its only illumination the faint lamplight that seeped in from the corridor. In the bed a figure lay, its back to the door, curled up and almost invisible under the blankets. The first intruder crept towards it, and reached out to put a hand over its mouth before it could scream.

The figure rolled over, opened its eyes, and smiled.

One yelped, ‘Bloody hell! It’s got a bloody beard!’

‘You must be the gentlemen sent to find my son,’ said the figure in the bed, sitting up swiftly and pulling out a hunting rifle from under the sheets. Outside, the drunken-seeming footman had suddenly acquired from inside his jacket a small but effective-looking pistol; at the end of the corridor, more shadows crossed in front of the light.

Lord Elwick smiled grimly. ‘I’m sorry - you missed him. But
I
have so been looking forward to talking with you.’

 

His name was Scuttle, he was twelve years old, so he claimed, and he was born to rule. More precisely, he ruled the north side of the riverbanks at low tide that ran between Blackfriars Bridge and the Tower of London. No mudlark, snipe or spoon hunter could enter his domain without first begging an audience from Young Master Scuttle. His throne was an old bathtub with a hole in it, that, turned upside-down, allowed him to sit cross-legged, like the old prattler up on Cheapside said the Rajahs did in India. He wore a velvet burgundy jacket the thickness of a spider’s web, and a crooked top hat supported only by his protruding ears. He kept order over his assembled courtiers, who had an average age of about nine, with a hook of the kind used by dyers to hang clothes to dry above the vats.

It was ten thirty in the morning when Tess, Thomas, Tate and Lin found him. Tate had been snuffling his way through the carcasses of boats rotting on the low-tide mark and his coat had quickly turned muddy brown from the slime thrown up by his paws and low-slung belly. Thomas was struggling to move under the weight of bags and equipment thrown across his shoulders - with which load neither of the ladies had offered to help, he noticed, with a pang of resentment that immediately made him guilty at the immaturity of his own feelings. He had, after all, volunteered to carry the bags, as befitted the man of the party. Lin and Tess had accepted his offer with, he couldn’t help but feel, a slightly too cheerful expression on both their faces.

The presence of Lin brought a swift reaction from the crowd of children gathered with their goods for barter around the bathtub where Scuttle regally sat. Anyone over five foot tall was suspect in the eyes of the mudlarks, who cringed back from Lin with a look to Scuttle for guidance. Thomas, meanwhile, was trying in vain to shake some of the mud off his trouser legs. The mire from the banks of the Thames, all thin green slime on thick grey-brown sludge, had somehow crawled as high as his knees, even though he was sure he had walked with utmost care and discretion from the steps at Blackfriars Bridge.

Scuttle said, ‘Oi, you here for the barter?’

Thomas tried not to gape. Lin beamed, and said, ‘Aren’t you a quaint little specimen?’

Tess marched up to the bathtub, ignoring the ooze of the mud and the rag-tag children who scampered out of her way. ‘Right, you, you owe me big, an’ now’s the time when it gets paid chop chop, all right?’

Scuttle said, ‘You can’t go an’ talk to me like that! Ain’t you got no dec ... deco ... dec ...’

‘Decorum?’ suggested Thomas politely.

Scuttle’s eyes narrowed. ‘An’ who the hell is this?’

‘Bigwig, this is Scuttle. Scuttle, this is bigwig,’ said Tess brightly. ‘Bigwig’s really called Thomas, I just call him bigwig ’cos of how he is. Scuttle’s really called Josiah, but he don’t like as people know that, ’cos it sounds all stupid.’

‘An’ what about the lady what ain’t normal-looking?’

‘Oh, you must mean me,’ exclaimed Lin. ‘I’m a knife-wielding fiend from ancient lore, a demon in the night, a dream in the moonlight and, may I say, I also make splendid chow mein. How do you do?’

‘Tess!’ wailed Scuttle. ‘You gone an’ met all funny sorts!’

‘Never you mind that,’ she exclaimed. ‘We need to go in the sewers, an’
you
’ - an accusing finger stabbed at Scuttle’s chest - ‘are gonna take us there.’

Seated on his bathtub, Scuttle flinched. ‘But Tess . . .’ he wheedled.

‘Don’t you go an’ try an’ get out of it. I done you plenty of good in the past. I lifted stuff what has kept you in bread an’ nice clothes when you was still scratching for teaspoons in the old tunnels, so watch it.’

‘Why you want to go there anyway? It ain’t nice down there, Tess, an’ besides’ - he leant towards her conspiratorially - ‘some of the snipes been goin’ missin’, ain’t they? Down in the new tunnels, it ain’t safe like it used to be.’

‘You mean, it ain’t safe like it used to be when the only thing what you had to worry about was bein’ attacked by rats or flooded by the tide or getting lost or havin’ poo drop on your head?’ asked Tess sweetly.

Thomas had turned green.

‘All right, all right, I see what you’re on about,’ muttered Scuttle. ‘But that don’t explain why you wanna go down there!’

‘I wanna go down there,’ replied Tess in a voice of infinite patience, ‘’cos there’s this evil bigwig bloke what
don’t
want me to go down there. I wanna go down there ’cos there’s this Machine what’s gonna kill these people an’ though I ain’t too sure of what these people are about, my guvnor says they’re all right really an’ as how it ain’t right to go judgin’ many all at once, an’ maybe he’s got a point there ’cos if you just say, “They’re all bad” then you’ll hurt everyone even if they ain’t all bad, an’ that’s summat I don’t rightly like the sound of. I wanna go down there ’cos this nice miss says my guvnor’s down there, an’ ’cos he needs savin’, an’ I wanna go down there ’cos I just find them sewers so
nice,
see? Now you gonna help or do I ’ave to sock you one?’

‘Miss Teresa!’ squeaked Thomas indignantly.

‘Stand back, bigwig,’ barked Tess. ‘This is lady’s work.’

Scuttle wilted under the force of Tess’s glower. ‘Oooh . . .’ he complained. ‘You gonna get me in’na so much shitty poo, Tess.’

She grinned. ‘You just about hit the nail on the head there.’

CHAPTER 15

Later, Lyle wanted to kick himself for not having worked it out before. Later, however, wasn’t early enough. Later, he remembered it all in flat, unsympathetic statements, cold grey images, nothing really left for feeling, although he could remember the sensation in his throat from all the shouting, and how tall Havelock looked. Mostly he remembered the moment when he had realized - with a sudden blooming of understanding after the sneaking build-up of information which warned him -
he could
...
he might
...
he can go so far
...

He had wondered why, Havelock had just left him in a darkened cell with confused strangers and their voices. They didn’t know him; he didn’t know them. After maybe an hour in the dark, the door had been opened. Not just Lyle, but all of them, the cell’s many occupants, had been prodded out at gunpoint into the dull orange glow from the furnaces, and lined up. Several of the faces had surprised him: some were older than their owner’s voice, some younger, in a mishmash of characteristics that, as far as he could tell, had almost nothing in common, except that they were all clearly in disgrace with Havelock. And they were afraid.

When they were all lined up, Havelock walked down the line, a bobbing face on a black shadow in the dull light of the furnace, seemingly oblivious to the heat rushing out from every inch of the bellied metal giants. He got to the end, where Lyle stood next to an oldish man with the beginnings of a rough beard, took a revolver from one of the men guarding them, checked that it was loaded, raised it and, without a word, shot the man next to Lyle.

Lyle would remember the strange seconds of silence that followed, and every time he did so, the silence seemed to have been longer as people saw but failed to understand exactly what had happened. He would remember blood on his face from the shot, the other man’s blood, and that where a human being had stood, now there was just a prostrate creature on the floor, wheezing for breath, clinging to a hole in his chest and sobbing and choking and dying all at once, his face the colour of tomatoes, his fingers pale as snow. Only when a woman fainted, three places down the row, did the rest begin to stir and shout and scream, and only then did Lyle kneel next to the man and tear at his clothes to see the wound, and press down as hard as he could while the blood flowed between his fingers like water squeezed from a sponge.

Havelock leant over Lyle to peer at the dying man with an expression of mild curiosity, and said calmly, ‘Well, he might survive for a while.’

And the little piece of Lyle that was a detective before it was a scientist, that was a copper and, more to the point, an angry one who had seen too many bodies, who knew that no matter what it did, the world would not yet change - that piece of him cracked. He threw himself at Havelock with all the strength he had and actually managed to get his slippery, bloody fingers on the man’s throat before he was pulled back and pushed to the ground, kicking and biting at anything that got in his way.

Havelock watched dispassionately while Lyle struggled, and then remarked, ‘Oh, look. I do believe he’s dead.’

Lyle sagged on to the floor and put his head in his bloody hands, then tucked it in towards his knees like a child afraid of spiders. Havelock prodded the man’s body with a toe, and murmured, ‘I wonder what he was called?’ And turned to the next one in the line, and raised the gun.

‘Please, stop.’ It was barely a whisper, a sigh from somewhere inside the bundle that was Lyle. ‘Please.’

Havelock raised his eyebrows. ‘I trust you understand this game, Horatio Lyle. I really do hope it is something you may comprehend.’

‘Please.’ Lyle looked up at Havelock and whispered, ‘Please.’

Havelock hesitated, then lowered the gun. He squatted down so that his face was level with Lyle’s. ‘This, Horatio,’ he explained gently, ‘is why you are weak. I don’t need the children to control you; I don’t even need your friends. I can take anyone off the street, and kill them before your eyes, and you will know that they are dying not for their own insignificant merits, but because of
you
.

‘This makes you easy - very easy - to control, in a game hardly worth my time or their blood to play. So, we will be simple, indeed childish, about these things. You
will
rebuild the regulator, and I will
not
go down the line killing every single person in it before your eyes. And if the regulator does not then work, I will go into the streets and kill, and make sure the bodies are laid at your door. Do you understand me?’

Lyle nodded.

‘Excellent! There, now, that wasn’t so hard, was it, Horatio? In the end, it will be much, much easier for you to build me a regulator that will kill hundreds of unseen, unknown Tseiqin at a stroke, than for you to watch a single person die and to
know
it’s your responsibility. I suppose that makes you a hypocrite; but frankly I’m more inclined to think it makes you a coward. To work, then! So much to do, such a busy time.’