The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (6 page)

‘A servant has just returned from the scene of last night’s arrival, sir.’

‘And? If you have news, speak it quickly.’

‘There have been complications.’

‘Such as?’

‘A witness.’

‘What kind of witness?’

‘A beggar heard voices in the night.’

‘It hardly seems a concern.’

‘Her ladyship might disagree. She was very clear - her aid comes at a price, father; it is necessary that no end is left . . .’

‘Her ladyship will not make a problem of it. Was there anything else, that you are so halting in your news?’

‘Lord Lincoln has sent Horatio Lyle to the docks.’

‘This should cause me concern?’

‘Her ladyship has mentioned him. He was involved at the incident at St Paul’s Cathedral, and it is rumoured that . . .’

‘We do not listen to rumours, do we?’

‘No, father. Forgive me. I merely thought that you should be made aware, as it might pose a threat to the Marquis if . . .’

‘It does not. If her ladyship should appear before sunset, inform her.’

‘Yes, father.’

A door closing. A sigh. The creak of a chair as someone leans back into it and considers, and relaxes. For now. And a brief thought, looking for a receptive brain to call home, sees the man with the maple-syrup voice and the eyes like the auburn leaves of autumn. Just for a second, doubt raises a cautious eye above the lip of the trench, before it is overwhelmed and forced on to happier hunting grounds, far, far away.

 

Inspector Vellum was in the wrong job. No one was entirely sure why he was a member of the Metropolitan Police, although it was rumoured that he was discharged from the army after a brief and fairly disastrous career in India, and had simply fallen for the police uniform and its shiny buttons. The Commissioner had been won over by the Inspector’s ability to spout proverbs, albeit at inconvenient moments, and regarded the Inspector’s knack of getting other people to do the work - probably how the Inspector regarded it too - as merely encouraging latent talent. The Inspector’s robotic nod to all colleagues he passed in the corridor eloquently expressed both his inherent nobility of character in merely acknowledging these lesser beings’ presence, and the necessity of him being Somewhere Very Important Immediately. When Mister Lyle talked about the Inspector, Tess was always slightly surprised to hear not just a new tone in his voice, but a whole new accent take over, as his mother’s East End sharpness competed with his father’s Yorkshire lilt, the power of opinion overwhelming the refinement of adulthood in his speech.

Tess knew that bad news awaited them as they returned to the
Pegasus
, because as they approached, Charles said not a word, but stood up straight and gave Lyle a single, crooked look of warning. Lyle took a deep breath and started down the wharf towards the ship. ‘Tess,’ he said quietly as they walked, ‘I want you to take Thomas and find a very long flexible watertight pipe, a pair of smithy’s bellows, two tins, a couple of pins, and any sulphur and saltpetre you can find.’

Tess thought about this. ‘You ain’t goin’ swimmin’, Mister Lyle?’

Despite himself, Lyle smiled. ‘That’s my lass.’

As the two children scurried off, a voice that could have come from Pinocchio’s nose during a bad fit of hay fever said, ‘Ah.
Mister
Lyle. What brings you here?’

‘Two legs and a hansom cab.’

‘A good way to travel, I’ve always believed; although I’m told,’ with a sound half-way to a cough, but which in any other man would clearly have been a snigger, ‘that your recent studies show an interest in more aeronautical activities. Tell me, are you familiar with Lord Byron’s view on—’

‘No.’

‘A man of the mind really must read Lord Byron, or His Lordship as he is fondly known in my family. It enhances perception, allows for a clearer interpretation of—’

‘Inspector Vellum, have
you
ever paused to consider the effect of air travelling at different velocities above and below a shaped fixed object of surface area “A” proportional to the downward force “F” of a construction accelerating through the air at velocity “V”, the effect on pressure and consequently the forces acting and so on that might be induced above and below the differential curve?’

‘I can’t say I’ve felt the need.’

‘One day, try.’ Lyle sidled cautiously up the plank leading on to the slanting deck of the
Pegasus
, and glared at the Inspector. ‘Until then,
I
have a royal commission to investigate and
you
are disturbing the evidence.’

The Inspector turned red. ‘Very well. I shall leave you to the tasks of a constable while I attempt to find a criminal.
But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near -
is it not so, Mister Lyle?’

‘Indeed, Inspector. I believe it was Lord Byron who once remarked to Ruskin,
Caesar adsum jam forte
,’ replied Lyle brightly, as Vellum skulked down the steps.

Alone in the fog, on the
Pegasus
, Lyle noted how much snow had fallen in the night: enough to leave a good inch over the ice on the leaning deck. Only a little, however, had built up on the lower side, where the ship leant unevenly. He tried to remember when it had stopped snowing the night before.

Footprints were dotted across the deck. He took his shoes off, flinching as his bare feet touched the snow. The deck sloped so severely it was hard to walk on and he had to pick his way across by clinging on to the mast, and the loose rigging which hung down from the neglected spars. The
Pegasus
was not a healthy ship. The sails were made of so many patched pieces, it was hard to tell which was the original fabric. The mast was scarred, and what little paint had survived the
Pegasus
’s life at sea was thin and peeling.

The ship creaked. Lyle made his way carefully over to the lower side of the slanting deck, and peered at its surface. It wasn’t hard to recognize the regulation shoeprint of the policemen, too recent even for a faint covering of snow, and his own footprints hardly made a visible mark. Which left four sets of prints, older and slightly snowed over, but still clear enough to follow. There was a confusing mish-mash on the plank up to the deck, but then they spread out. He identified the captain’s footprints, and followed them. From the gangway, with Stanlaw’s footsteps just behind, they headed towards the cargo hold, stopped on the threshold into darkness, and shuffled round in a mess of snow to face Stanlaw’s footprints. These were deeper and slightly disturbed, but still less fidgety than the Captain’s where both men had stood still. The footprints then moved together away from the cargo hold, stopped once more, and changed again.

There was the faintest drag mark, ending in a tiny point as if the Captain had literally been pulled up by the toes, besides a deeper, human-sized indentation in the snow where something had fallen, quite hard. By this time, the other set of footprints had changed, the stride growing narrower and the pressure of the toes increasing while the heel decreased to almost nothing: Stanlaw was running. These impressions abruptly ended just by the side of the ship, where there was a similar drag mark and man-sized impression.

Lyle followed a further set of footprints, which seemed to start at the top of the stairs down to the hold, move over to each impression of a body in the snow, pick them up leaving shallow drag marks, move to the edge of the deck, turn, and stop in a little shuffle. There they faced the fourth and final pair of shoes, fine shoes too, but no pair that Lyle could immediately recognize. There were deeper marks here as the two sets of prints faced each other, with a tiny ridge around the edge of every mark, as if the falling snow had built up when the men had stood and talked so long.

Lyle stared at the two sets of tracks leaving the ship and frowned. At the top of the plank, he could see the fourth pair leave, the pair that hadn’t gone anywhere near the bodies, and he could also see it arrive. But there was no sign that the third pair of footprints, the set whose owner had dragged the bodies over the side and pulled up each man until just their toes touched the ground, had come on the ship. The footprints started at the cargo hold, nowhere else. And there was something
wrong
about the prints. Lyle knelt down by one and peered at it, leaning so close his nose almost touched the snow.

And he knew what was wrong. Five large toe marks, the ball of a heel and an empty space where the foot arched, that was what was wrong. The footprints were large and very, very heavy - too large to be a woman’s, he decided, and the toes unusually long, but that wasn’t what upset him. What upset him was that this person who had left with the pair of leather shoes that Lyle couldn’t recognize had had bare feet, and had been on the ship before it even started to snow.

Lyle turned and looked at the dark drop into the cargo hold, tight narrow stairs going down as close to vertical as possible without actually turning into a ladder, and heard again the creak of the dying ship. In a worried but conversational tone, he rubbed at his hairline nervously and, addressing the ship, announced, ‘I’ve got a sinking feeling about you.’ Then felt just a little embarrassed.

 

Thomas Edward Elwick, only son and heir of Lord Thomas Henry Elwick (Order of the Magpie, Cross of the Sallow Oak, Knight of the Daffodil and devout believer in the quality of your hounds as a proof of intellectual and spiritual endeavour), was in culture shock. And had been for a number of months. How he had met Tess was obvious - where Lyle went, the short, wild-haired and frequently larcenous Tess was never far behind. How he had met Mister Lyle was more of a blur. He remembered something about strange men with a Plan; one of those Plans that wasn’t just any old mish-mash of vague aspirations and a decent railway timetable, but a real, heart-stopping Plan. He remembered something about a thunderstorm and a cathedral. He remembered seeing Mister Lyle fall. But there were other things which he remembered, and didn’t quite understand, things which, at the time, had seemed to make sense. But the more he tried to analyse them logically, the less plausible they became.

He remembered a time after, too, when he’d looked up at his father and for the first time in his life, realized that his father didn’t understand. He remembered the moment when Lyle had turned round and said calmly, ‘Have you seen Da Vinci’s sketches working on the principle of forcing air downwards to create a lower area of pressure above the craft rather than below?’

Which was an improvement on his father’s ‘If God had meant us to fly, he
never
would have invented the pheasant! Let that be a warning to you, m’boy!’

Somehow, at the end of it all, he was here; following Teresa Hatch as she darted through the maze of toppling streets that made up the docks, all sprawled along the riverside as if some great god had got bored and just thrown them down with a shrug and a splatter. The roads, Thomas realized, weren’t roads at all, just gaps that houses hadn’t yet colonized, getting pressed tighter and tighter by the weight of human life in every possible form, but mostly a squalid, deprived, starving one, pushing down on the streets themselves. Tess seemed to know every alley, and Thomas wondered if it was his imagination that made her eyes gleam every time she saw a bulging pocket, or made the few loose coins on the smithy’s desk vanish as her hand passed within a foot or two. He knew that Tess was what his father would have called, ‘
Not
One of Us,’ or quite possibly, ‘Reprobate,’ or, if he was really pushing, ‘Socially undesirable,’ but at the same time ... she
was
very good at what she did. Thomas had heard Lyle say this in almost an embarrassed voice several times, usually with a warning not to let Tess know on pain of instant insufferability.

So Thomas trailed along behind, senses overwhelmed by everything he saw, smelt, heard. He had never realized faces could come in such variety: not just a mixture of a dozen noses with a dozen chins all juggled up together to make a few hundred combinations, but each face stamped with its past as well as its biology, marked by the lines of its trade or seared by far-away sun; skins and colours and eyes and scowls and smiles - few of those indeed - in such diversity that Thomas almost wanted to touch his own face, just to feel what it was like, wondering if it too could look like that, had the potential to be so rough or scarred or burnt, or so black or pale, or so pinched or old.

In the fog, there was no way of keeping track of where they were as they darted from place to place, getting everything that Mister Lyle wanted and, to Thomas’s quiet disapproval, a whole suet pudding too. (‘So as we don’t starve of neg . . . negl . . . of bein’ all starved.’)

They ate the suet pudding quickly on one of the bollards by the riverside, and Thomas, to his guilt, enjoyed it immensely. Then the two of them walked up uneasily on to the crooked deck of the
Pegasus
.

Lyle was nowhere to be seen. Thomas cleared his throat and opened his mouth to call out, when a voice drifted up from almost underneath his feet, echoing in the cold and gloom: ‘Did you leave me any pudding?’

Thomas turned bright red, but Tess leant past him, peered down the tight stairs into the deck below and called out, one loud, deliberate word at a time, ‘It ain’t good for you, Mister Lyle. We had to eat it ’cos if we didn’t you might’ve made yourself
ill
an’ then how’d you’ve cooked supper?’

‘As always, Teresa,’ said Lyle, head rising up suddenly from the darkness of the deck, ‘your care for my well-being is heart-warming. ’ His eyes turned to Thomas, and he broke into a grin. ‘I see Teresa got you to carry everything.’

‘Yes, Mister Lyle. I mean, naturally, it was my duty to ensure that the lady -’

Tess almost laughed. Lyle’s smile trembled round the edges with the effort of self-control. Thomas felt the tips of his ears burning. ‘- naturally . . . didn’t have to suffer any inconvenience . . .’