The Doomsday Machine (Horatio Lyle) (6 page)

‘I was just sayin’,’ said a huge woman in an off-white dress dotted with a mixture of flour, blood and chicken feathers, ‘as how this is just the right time to buy eels!’

‘Eels?’ repeated Lyle, in the strained voice of a man who can’t quite believe this is a conversation he’s involved in.

‘It’s the season for them,’ she said firmly. ‘Any later and you have to cook them up in something special to give them any taste. But now, just give me an eel and whack it into a cold eel pie and I’ll have the master drooling, you’ll see.’

‘Master ain’t liking eels!’ said someone else.

‘He does!’

‘He don’t!’

‘He does!’

‘I’m tellin’ you, he don’t ever . . .’

‘Perhaps he only likes in-season eels?’ hazarded Lyle, before the argument could become violent.

Five pairs of disbelieving eyes turned in Lyle ’s general direction. Seeing that this was the way the feeling in the room was going, Tess glared at Lyle as well, to make it clear that she was on the side of the masses in this debate, whatever it was about. Tate took advantage of the pause to steal another chestnut from Tess’s lap.

‘What was you after again?’ said the cook.

‘He ’s here about Mrs Cozens,’ hissed the butler in a conspiratorial voice.

‘Oh, that bat! What ’s she gone and done?’

‘Can’t really say that, ma’am,’ said Lyle in his best pompous voice. ‘I just need to ask you some questions.’

‘What about?’

‘Mr Berwick - when did you last see him here?’

There was an embarrassed silence. Then the maid muttered, ‘He’s in America an’ all.’

The silence stretched out so long Tess became aware of the sound of the upstairs grandfather clock ticking, and the fall of feet on the crackety floorboards above. Finally Lyle said, ‘America?’

‘That’s right.’ No one met his eye.

‘Have you heard of Newgate exercise yard?’ Five pairs of eyes gave nothing away. Lyle sighed like a patient man and in the same breath said, ‘It ’s a space about five foot by five foot, where every day the prisoners of the Crown are allowed to march round and round in circles for an hour stretch, maximum, wearing masks so that they can’t see the faces of the others and holding a piece of string for guidance. If they speak, they are punished. And then there’s the oakum hall, where you have to sit working at getting rope from oakum until your fingers bleed, and then there ’s the treadmill which is rather self-explanatory, and the crank, where you wind and wind and wind a crank on a barrel for no good reason until you collapse from eventual exhaustion and then . . .’

‘He ain’t in America,’ muttered the cook’s assistant.

‘No,’ said Lyle kindly, ‘I know he ’s not. So, where is he?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘Why did you say he was in America?’

‘He told us to!’

‘Him, personally, he told you to lie?’

‘It ain’t a lie if your master tells you to tell it.’

‘I wouldn’t use that as a defence in court, if I were you. When was this?’

‘’Bout five months back.’

‘Five months? My goodness - does he turn up here at all?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Well,’ Lyle ’s voice had taken on the tones of infinite patience, ‘when was he
last
here?’

‘What ’s this got to do with Mrs Cozens?’

‘Your master has told you to lie and is pretending to be in America, a lie Mrs Cozens maintains with gusto. I think I’m entitled to a question or two, don’t you? When was he last here?’

‘Four days ago.’

‘He doesn’t stay the night here?’

‘No, he stays where he works.’

‘Where does he work?’

‘Don’t know!’

‘What did he do here?’

‘Looked at some books, ate some food, left clothes for washing, and left again! He gets paid really well.’ The maid’s eyes lit up.

‘How do you know?’

‘He gave us all a rise! And with him hardly here we need do nearly nothing; he ’s just throwing away the money!’

‘What books did he look at?’

‘Don’t know. It’s all just books, right?’

Lyle flinched. ‘There’s no such thing as
just
...’ he began painfully, saw Tess’s reproving expression and swallowed the words down again. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Yes. Well, perhaps. So he comes here every now and again . . . how regularly?’

‘Every other week or so, you know? No predicting for sure when he’s going to turn up.’

‘And then leaves almost immediately?’

‘Yes, that ’s about right.’

‘And Mrs Cozens - she’s new?’

‘Hired in special to look after the house while he’s gone. Don’t think he interviewed her or anything, she just sort of ... turned up.’

‘Who does she talk to?’

‘Sometimes this bloke in a top hat comes to talk to her.’

‘The city is full of blokes in top hats,’ scowled Lyle. ‘
Who?
What name does he leave?’

The butler sat up. ‘Mr Augustus Havelock,’ he said. ‘The man’s called Mr Augustus Havelock.’

In the silence, the tick of the upstairs grandfather clock became deafening. At length, in a voice rattling from a throat suddenly tight as a noose, Lyle said, ‘Are you sure of that name?’

‘Yes. Is he important?’

‘He . . . has his moments. I need to see Berwick’s room.’

‘I ain’t sure if that’s ...’

‘Miss,’ snapped Lyle, grey eyes suddenly burning, ‘in my time, I have been hit by lightning and chased by madmen, I have built a machine that can fly above the city and fought a battle on the ice of a frozen river. If you could imagine half the things that frighten me, you would never be able to sit alone in a darkened room by yourself, and of all the things in this world that alarm me, Augustus Havelock is right up there, next to demons with glowing eyes, on the top of my list. If your master is mixed up with Augustus Havelock, and wanted by
Them
at the same time, then your salary had better be very, very good, because I swear all manner of trouble is just itching to come your way. Now show me his room!’

Tess had just one memory of Augustus Havelock, and even then, she couldn’t put a face to it. It had been an encounter that felt an infinity ago, when the world was fuzzy and out of focus, and she woke up every day surprised to find that a week had gone by, not sure of when the next week would come, a time before the night she ’d met Horatio Lyle, and everything had changed.

Even if there was no face, there was the voice still firmly in her mind, as sharp as the snap of a silk flag in a strong breeze, soft until the click of the sharper sounds, when she could hear the teeth in his mouth as sure as if he was a feeding piranha closing his jaws for the kill.

He had said, ‘Miss Teresa Hatch. I’m informed you are a very, very good thief.’

She had said, ‘I’m good, yep. Whatcha want, bigwig?’

He had said, ‘For a start, respect. You may call me Mr Havelock. And I will pay you five pounds for the privilege.’

And for five pounds, she had called him Mr Havelock. For the same five pounds, she promised to do just one job for him, on a house on that strange class barrier between the slums of Blackfriars and the streets off the Strand, where the medieval buildings of Fleet Street decayed into rotting wooden sheds or were replaced by new brick houses, and where Mr Horatio Lyle patiently carried out his experiments, long into the night. For five pounds she would have run to Edinburgh and back and still had change from the expenses - but things were different now. Things had changed the night she went to earn her five pounds, and now she only remembered Augustus Havelock as a bad dream.

Horatio Lyle clearly remembered Augustus Havelock with more distinct feeling, apparent as he systematically tore Berwick’s bedroom to pieces, dragging pillows off the bed, peering under the mattress, opening every drawer and even looking behind every book, running his fingers down their spines and scowling at every title on the shelf.

‘Magnetism, magnetism, magnetism!’ he chanted, turning from the bookshelf. ‘Berwick, Havelock and bloody magnetism!’

‘It might be all right?’ hazarded Tess. ‘I mean . . . like this bloke Havelock, he ain’t done nothin’
evil
for a while, yes?’

‘Apart from hiring you to break into my house?’ suggested Lyle.

‘Well, yes, but that were all his fault and nothin’ to do with me!’

‘Augustus Havelock is a
bad person
,’ hissed Lyle. ‘He ’s never doing anything but it ’s for something
bad
.’

‘How’d you know him anyway?’

‘Oh, we ’ve met many times,’ he rumbled, running his fingers round the edge of the wall in the forlorn hope it might not be as solid as it looked. ‘He likes to say he’s a scientist.’

‘Well, that can’t be so nasty!’

‘He’s a scientist who’s stolen every idea he ’s had from better people, a scientist who bullies and threatens and buys his way into power. Everything he ’s ever done that’s been in any sense original work has all been about power;
power
is the end of learning, he learns for wealth and ambition and studies for greed and personal gain and reads to use what he knows, to manipulate it and ...’

‘That don’t sound bad.’

‘Teresa, he will only study the ocean if he’s sure there’s buried treasure under it. He will only study the stars if he thinks he needs to navigate, he will only study the soil if he thinks it can be tilled to grow a cheaper kind of tobacco.’

‘So?’

‘He has never once looked at the stars and . . . and just
stopped
. He has never once thought that the moon is beautiful and that the sky at night is a marvel. He has never once looked at the ocean when the sun is coming up across it and thought it would make a picture. He has never once looked at the mathematics of a pine cone and seen an infinite regression of numbers, a dance of numbers in nature, and smiled to think that there is something more we do not understand, smiled to realize that there is more to learn, more to see, more to marvel at, he . . . he does not
marvel
at it. There is no beauty in the sun unless it is warming his crops, there is no miracle in the maths unless it is winding the spindle on the loom, there is no joy in the stars unless they are falling to earth to be counted and sold again. Everything he does is for himself. He is nothing but . . . coldness. Calculating, dispassionate coldness.’

‘Is that why he . . . wanted stuff stolen from you? ’Cos you and him . . . are all grrry an’ all?’

‘Teresa, he wanted my plans for a . . .’ Lyle froze. ‘Oh my goodness.’

‘What?’

‘He told you to steal the papers in the study, didn’t he? Top left shelf, behind the silver nitrate?’

‘So? An’ remember, it ain’t my fault an’ all an’ how I’m all nice really an’ you promised not to turn me in ’cos . . .’

‘Teresa, those were preliminary designs for a capacitor bank.’

‘A whatty?’

‘A tool for storing charge, but I mean a lot of charge, I mean millions and millions and millions of coulombs of charge, billions - do you know what a billion is?’

‘No. What ’s that?’

‘It ’s a number with nine zeros after it.’

‘An’ ... that’s big?’

‘All right, put it another way. If everyone in Britain and France and probably Italy too all came to London and stood shoulder to shoulder, they would fill every street of the city to the very, very edge, and there would be no space to move, no space to breathe, every house and every floor of every street in the city full of people, yes?’

‘Yes?’

‘Now take about eighty Londons full of all these people and put them all shoulder to shoulder and you have roughly a billion people.’

Tess thought about it. Finally she said, ‘That’s ... big, right?’

‘You’re there.’

‘So ... this big, big number ... what ’s it doin’ exactly?’

‘That was what the drawings were about. So much energy, all locked up in one place, ready to be discharged at any moment. They were only preliminary plans, of course, I don’t think it could really have been built, the resource needs were too high, not to mention the gold, but . . .’

‘Gold?’

‘. . . but Berwick expressed interest in the designs too . . .’

‘You said somethin’ ’bout gold . . .’

‘My God, what ’s he got himself involved with?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Thank you, Teresa.’

‘Just tryin’ to be helpful.’

‘I’ve got to find him.’

‘
Really?
’ She saw his face and let out a pained little sigh. ‘Right. ’Course. What we needs is a
clue.
Oh oh oh oh . . . maybe!’

‘Maybe?’ asked Lyle hopefully.

‘Erm ... no. I don’t think it’s going to work.’

‘Fantastic.’

‘How’s about ...’

‘Yes?’

‘Erm ... uh . . . maybe Tatey-watey could track him down?’

Two pairs of sceptical eyes turned to Tate, who, aware of the attention fixed on him, rolled over with his paws in the air, ears sprawled out on either side of his head, and belly up, waiting to be scratched. Lyle said in a strained voice, ‘I’m not sure if Tate appreciates his role in this investigation.’