The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (16 page)

‘What about the witnesses? Milner? The beggar?’

‘Murdered by someone of the same immense strength and ruthlessness as possessed by Sasso, but left-handed, not right-handed. I don’t know where Edgar is.’

‘Do you have any idea where Sasso or Caryway are now?’

‘First . . . tell me about this.’ Lyle pulled Stanlaw’s small iron ring out of his pocket. ‘What’s the significance of the cogs, the clock face?’

Lincoln hardly glanced at it. ‘Nothing. I’ve never seen it before.’

Lyle grinned. ‘That, my lord, was as big a lie as Napoleon’s declaration in favour of republicanism.’

‘Do you know where Sasso is?’

Lyle scratched his chin, rubbed his nose, tickled his forehead, then nodded. ‘Yes. I think so.’

Lincoln sat back, face set in ice. ‘But you are refusing to tell me.’

‘Uh . . . yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I think the answer would be more polite from the man in the burgundy scarf who is following me.’ For a second, there was a flicker on Lincoln’s face, a moment of doubt. Lyle frowned, seeing something there he hadn’t expected. ‘Good grief,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not you, is it?’

‘I do not know to what you are referring, Mister Lyle.’

‘There’s . . . something . . . you’re not telling me, and . . .’ Lyle scowled. ‘Why are you so afraid of a murderer? There are . . . parts . . . the blade, that’s . . . part . . .’ He frowned. His fingers had started tapping idly on the table next to him, a little sharp rhythm, that had just slipped in, as if it had been floating through the air,
Hark, hark
...

‘You said . . . he recovered “in a manner”. What does that mean?’

When Lincoln didn’t answer, Lyle looked up, and found himself the object of the other man’s steely, unblinking gaze.

‘That, Mister Lyle, is something you must answer for yourself. ’

CHAPTER 11

‘Where’s the evil bigwig?’

‘Gone, Teresa.’

‘You want cake?’

‘You got
cake
? I thought I said to get something healthy . . .’

‘Thomas wanted to, but when he went and looked in his pocket it seemed how he’d lost all his money . . .’

‘Mister Lyle, I think that Miss Teresa actually might have
pickpock—
’

‘It’s got treacle in it, Mister Lyle.’

‘Treacle? Really?’

‘But Mister Lyle, Miss Teresa
stole
-’

‘Not now, Thomas.’ There was a strange slurping noise. It was the sound made by a proud man trying to eat hot treacle cake in a dignified manner, and failing. It required a respectful silence.

When the last traces of treacle had been mopped away, Tess said, ‘What we doin’ now?’

‘Looking for Lady Diane Lumire, companion to Ignatius Caryway and quite possibly conspirator to protect a murderer from the course of justice. At least, that’s what you’re doing. I’m going to find Edgar.’

‘Oh. Is that good?’

‘It’s why you’re going to wear a dress, Teresa. And ... Teresa?’

‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’

‘I couldn’t help notice how Thomas left some of his money on the kitchen table a few days ago.’

‘But I didn’t . . .’ began Thomas. ‘Ow!’

‘Sorry, lad, was that your knee? Tess - perhaps you could go and get Thomas’s money for him?’

‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’

 

Five in the afternoon. The snow had been squashed by too many feet, and frozen as a deadly black slick across every street and between every cobble. People weren’t bothering with the bridges across the river, but just walked straight across the ice, enjoying the novelty. The fog was rising again, so heavy with suspended ice that people breathed through their scarves to stop the cold searing their lungs. The lamplighters had almost considered giving up - even if they could find the lamps, it was questionable whether their light would be seen. Each man, woman and child looked for a taper or a lantern to carry through the streets, as the dark settled again, promising a long night to come.

And at one house overlooking the city, the doorbell was ringing. The man who answered it was a new employee, and though he had come from the highly respectable Norfolk Club with excellent references, he was still finding his feet. He didn’t really deserve what life had in store for him.

The door opened. Mr Cartiledge looked out and saw no one. He heard an embarrassed cough at knee-height. ‘Yes, miss? May I assist you?’

In the face that looked up at him, angelic light shone out from the deep brown eyes above a neat little blue dress. It somehow said, ‘Here be innocent charm; love it well.’

The high-pitched voice spoke slowly, as if its owner was concentrating hard on how every syllable sounded. ‘Oh good sir, I hope I ain ... have not disturbed you but I was looking for my uncle. Is he home?’

‘Forgive me, miss, but who are you?’

‘Why, how dare you say something like that! Can you not recognize Lady Teresa of ... America? Yes, that’s right. Lady Teresa of America!’

The disbelieving look that Cartiledge had spent many years repressing slid back across his features. ‘Of . . . North America?’ hazarded the girl. Aware that she was losing the initiative she said in a louder voice, ‘Anyway, I’m looking for Uncle Ignatius so I can give him this lovely bunch of flowers and tell him about Mummy.’ For a second, Cartiledge thought he saw a scowl and almost heard a cynical lilt in her words. But then the almost-but-not-quite angelic smile washed back over her.

‘I’m sorry, miss; who did you say your uncle was?’

‘Good old Uncle Ignatius Caryway.’ Her face fell. ‘Please, sir, I’ve come such an awful long way to see him, and I’m just a poor little girl, cruelly neglected by my family, and I’m so hungry and really . . . really . . .’ a tear welled in her eye ‘. . . miss my uncle.’ At which Teresa Hatch dropped her flowers and collapsed in tears at Cartiledge’s feet.

 

At roughly the same time that Teresa Hatch was practising good elocution and better manners, Horatio Lyle stood shivering outside a warehouse by the Amber Wharves, where the busy streets were too narrow for even the smallest of carts to squeeze through. Snow had started to fall, and a cheerful demeanour was not enough to compensate for the grating cold. As he watched the street, he sang under his breath,

He was aware of another figure lingering in the cold. Even though the figure kept itself well out of his line of sight, in the air he could see a regular puffing of breath from someone just around the corner, who hadn’t moved for as long as Lyle himself hadn’t.

He felt a little guilty at sending the children off alone to the mansions in Hampstead; but, he told himself, better there than here.

Lyle detached himself from the wall where he’d been leaning and started walking again, flapping his arms across each other like a startled chicken to get some heat back into his limbs. He rounded a corner into a crowded, slightly wider street, towered over by cranes and warehouses; boxes and bundles swung through the air overhead. A costermonger selling brown paper bagfuls of sugar pawed at Lyle’s arm.

Lyle bought a bag, paid a shilling extra and said, ‘I’m looking for the beggar man Edgar. Have you seen him?’

‘Push off, copper.’

Lyle stood up straighter and snapped in his officious voice, ‘I say, what’s this then? You call that weight a pound, it looks more like an ounce to me. Let’s have a feel - wouldn’t be measuring crooked, would you, not a fine, upstanding, law-abiding, helpful, I’m thinking about
helpful
here as one of several trouble-avoiding characteristics, citizen such as yourself?’

The costermonger, who was a bright lad, sucked at his teeth. ‘Uh . . . Edgar . . . short cove, old, picks as many pockets with his prattle as he does with his hands, that Edgar, maybe?’

‘Could be.’

‘Ain’t seen him all day.’ The costermonger turned to go, but found his path impeded by Lyle’s boot, and a heavy hand on his arm.

‘But if you were Edgar, and you felt nervous, where would you go?’

 

Tate was snoring. It was spectacular. The snore started at the tip of his nose, which vibrated hugely like a spring in tension, then spread, rippling wave-like down his ears and back again, humming through his paws and all the way to the tip of his tail, which rose up, twitched, and relaxed again with each deep snore.

Thomas sat in the back of a hansom cab, Tate snuggled protectively beneath his outstretched feet, and worried. It was something he was good at, inherited mostly from his mother, as his father had never felt anything in his life more than mild irritation at the consternation of being. Every now and then he glanced out of the window towards Hampstead Hill, whose mansions, comfortably above the smoke line, looked down on the city; and he worried. Thomas felt that he, not Tess, should have been the one to go up to one of those grand houses to ask about Diane Lumire; he worried too because Mister Lyle was somewhere down in the docks looking for Edgar. He worried because his parents would be back from the countryside any one of these days and they’d start asking where he’d been and why he didn’t know the ancient Greek for ‘anthropomorphic’; he worried because he knew Mrs Milner had died, having secretly read the papers Lyle had been trying to hide just after breakfast; he realized there were Things Going On that he didn’t know about; and he worried anyway because that was what Thomas did. He tried to think of Queen and Country in an attempt to calm himself down, but, unusually, it didn’t work. Under his breath he tried singing a few bars of a patriotic hymn, but found the words getting jumbled. He tried to think about anything that didn’t involve worry and, for a moment, imagined that he saw the world stretched out, the clouds all below him, his worries flown, snatched away by the speeding wind that held him up.

Thomas let out a sigh, and leant back into his seat. It was going to be a long night.

 

There was a workshop by the river, to the south of Limehouse with its workers’ clubs and belching factories, with shuttered doors and nailed-up windows, waiting to be purchased and rebuilt. Once upon a time, it had produced sloops for the navy and merchantmen making the short hop across to Holland or the French ports, but in recent years it had found itself challenged by the trend in giant metal behemoths burning coal and churning giant wheels for propulsion; so after almost two hundred years of construction, its owners had put out the lights and shut down. Rot had set into the floors, now held in place only by the ice that had frozen the planks solid, so that when Lyle made his cautious entry through a broken window his feet immediately slipped out from under him and flew upwards, depositing him on his back with the acrobatic grace of a drunken elephant.

He staggered up with as much dignity as he could manage, and shuffled his way across the floor. Between the shattered floorboards, he could see dim light reflecting off thin ice over black water, while the floor groaned under his weight.

‘Hello? Edgar? Edgar, it’s Mister Lyle, are you in here?’

A faint sound over his head, a thud like something heavy falling a long way off. ‘Edgar? It’s Mister Lyle, the nice gentleman with the available money and tactful sense of compromise?’

He saw a staircase, looking as if most of it had been used for firewood, and edged towards it. ‘I’m coming up!’ he called, then under his breath added, ‘God help us.’

At the foot of the staircase he heard a sudden outbreak of noise, like a stone roof falling a piece at a time on to a pile of percussion instruments, and pulled himself up the staircase, clinging for support to the open top of the floor above.

The watery evening light trickled through the broken windows, past the ashes of a small fire that could have been made of the defrosted floorboards themselves, past a small pot of solidified porridge, past the padded boots of old Edgar, up his arm to his face. It was turned towards Lyle, with accusing pale eyes, unblinking like a fish.

Lyle crawled up on to the floor, edged towards Edgar, and felt along his white, twisted throat for a pulse. The skin was cold, rapidly dropping to room temperature. He sat back and looked around, feeling his stomach begin to turn and his hands to itch, the cold suddenly a thing coming from inside his bones.

A shadow moved behind him. Lyle twisted round to where it had been. But the shape that had been caught in the light, swathed in a black coat, was already bounding back down the stairs. Lyle sprang up and threw himself after it, now blind to the weakness of the floor. He heard its footsteps hammering, the wood beneath it bending, creaking and splintering as though made by not one person but twenty; in comparison his own hurried footsteps were a quiet afterthought. At the bottom of the stairs he turned, saw a figure slipping out through the broken window where he’d come in, and raced after it, ducking through the frame and out into the dull light of the wharf. The shape ran towards the river, moving with a slight stiffness, as if finding it hard to drag the weight of its own limbs.