The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (4 page)

‘I think I can aid you in an alien world. Be your guide, counsellor, protector. Maybe even a friend. What do you say?’

And the other thought about it, and it was good.

 

Horatio Lyle had a dog, and that dog was, for reasons unknown possibly even by its, for want of a better word, ‘master’, called Tate. The true biological origins of Tate lay lost in the mist of space and time, and those few experts in animal breeding who had ever examined the floppy-eared creature in any great detail had all come back concurring that, whatever had happened, it probably wasn’t ever going to happen again, and maybe that was for the best. Quite what it was that upset these animal experts so greatly about the basically well-meaning creature, they never said and could never really explain. Probably it was just a sense of inferiority.

A moment, to share perspectives ...

Welcome to the Docks, Symbol of Britain’s Greatness! Come stretch your paws, little Tate, and savour the smell ...

Millions of lives moving in and out of each other on the way to a better place; a million rough coats brushing against a million rough jackets; a million hob-nail boots trampling a million yards of damp, pale mud turned silver-black with the overnight ice and squashed, kicked snow now so much liquid filth; spices, silks, salt, stone, statues, ships, sails, sailors, slime, smoke; a hundred different ways of saying ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye ’; a hundred different definitions of crumbling shanty roofs sporting five hundred yards of downward-pointing icicle; a hundred different weaknesses of beer; a thousand different ladies of the land looking for a thousand and one sons of the sea; a hundred cats; a million rats; a dozen ways into the sewers, two dozen men and boys competing to get into them - one silver spoon somewhere inside, catch it if you can; two changes of the tide; three new quays; four new companies; ten former slaves startled to find freedom; twenty former freemen startled to discover slavery and a one-way ticket to Australia; thirty soldiers of the Queen’s Navy trying to recover the familiar swaying of the sea by a shilling’s worth of rum; five convicts hoping to sneak overseas; two bobbies knowing what they’re trying; one physician convinced that it was a mistake to restrict opium, now forced into selling morphine as an alternative; one nurse back from the Crimea at long last, who suspects that clean hands are more useful than the juice of a poppy plant when it comes to amputation; black skin, yellow skin, white skin, red skin, pink skin, beetroot skin with a lumpy nose made of whisky, brown skin, tanned skin, pampered skin, cracked skin, smooth skin. Welcome to the Docks, Symbol of Britain’s Greatness! And where would
you
like to go today?

‘The thing is,’ Lyle said absently, eyes dancing on the face of every man and woman and shadow who drifted out of the fog, hands buried in his pockets, ‘there are so many people here, and so many in and out every day, that the police hardly bother with watching it any more. Easier by far to track down the killer of a rich society lady who moved in a circle of five good friends and fifty expedient ones, than it is to find the man in a million who murdered an unknown, shunned and lost street girl in a part of the city where English is spoken in thirty different accents that are unintelligible to the average city-bred copper.’

‘So ... what we doin’ here?’ demanded Tess, glancing round at each passing face with the uneasy expression of someone coming back to an old haunting ground, and hoping its ghosts won’t remember her.

‘Well, we’re . . .’ Lyle hesitated. He looked round for inspiration, and saw Thomas’s eager face lit up in expectation. ‘We’re doing our duty as good citizens of Her Majesty.’

Thomas’s face could have guided ships into port on a stormy night. Tess scowled at Lyle, who had the decency to look sheepish. Tate sneezed. The four walked on, while the fog grew thicker, and the narrow walls of the street, all makeshift and already crumbling houses, warehouses and shop fronts, smelling of the seas, threatened to vanish behind the fog’s endless white wall. It was hard to tell the hour, but Tess half-thought she heard a church bell ring out ten a.m., a long way off.

Thomas, idling along, head turning like a pigeon’s as he squinted through the fog from one wonder to another, whether it was the cripple calling out for alms or the sailors scowling at all who passed them by, stepped forward, into empty space. He tottered for a second, back foot sliding out behind him on the thick ice mushed into a deadly black sheen by the dozens of boots which had passed by, then teetered forward. A hand grabbed him by the collar and gracelessly pulled him back from the edge of the quayside, visible only as a long line where the white pavement stopped and white fog began, with a hint of thick black water a long way below. Lyle steadied Thomas and said quietly, ‘Ah! Well done. The waterside. Just what we were looking for.’

 

Lyle was always surprised at how much free time the average London spectator could find to stand around and watch a spectacle. He’d seen thousands gather for a really good fire, never helping to put it out, but generally agreeing that it was a damn good blaze and well worth watching. He’d seen hundreds join in the enthusiastic chase of a pickpocket one day, and the crowd had just kept on picking up people as it moved, until half the pursuers seemed convinced that it was a rush to a fair or for a pot of gold, and the pickpocket was long gone, dived into a rookery alley or up a drainpipe.

Despite having seen all these things, Lyle was surprised at quite how large the crowd was that had gathered round the tattered remains of the
Pegasus
. A representative of every part of society seemed to have magically appeared, from a collection of officious-looking men in top hats with the air of people who dabbled secretly in insurance when no one was watching, to the smallest street urchin whose interest was engaged more by the gold fob-watch of one of the top-hatted men than by the actual ship. A line of bobbies had formed a semi-circle round the quayside and wharf that led up to the side of the
Pegasus
, which even to Lyle’s inexperienced eye and through the blanket of fog didn’t look well.

Tess tilted her head thoughtfully on one side as they approached, until the
Pegasus
seemed to be standing upright again, and said, ‘Mister Lyle?’

‘Yes, Teresa?’ Lyle already sounded resigned to what was coming.

‘It ain’t normal for no ship to look like that?’

‘No, Teresa. That is what’s known, I believe, as listing.’

‘You mean ... kinda leanin’ the wrong way?’

‘Technically,’ chimed in Thomas helpfully, ‘there is no such thing as “the wrong way” when a ship is listing, owing to the fact that any motion in a plane other than the forward one is a highly inefficient transfer of ... ow!’

‘Sorry,’ said Lyle, hastily taking his foot off Thomas’s. ‘All this ice is very slippery.’ If Thomas’s upbringing had been a little less restrictive and his natural disposition a little more flexible, he would have pouted all the way to the ring of bobbies. As it was, nothing but a concerned frown plastered itself across his face, as he wondered whether there was anything he could do to give Mister Lyle’s shoes a little bit more friction against the ground.

Lyle faced the first bobby, fixed his features in a serious expression, and proclaimed in his deepest, most authoritative voice, ‘Erm . . . hello.’

Icy eyes stared back. The confidence drained from Lyle’s face. ‘You’re not going to believe me if I say I’m here by royal appointment, are you?’

It seemed unlikely for anything to be colder than the fog, but this man’s expression managed it. Lyle started patting his pockets. ‘I’m sure I’ve got something official-looking here . . .’

And a voice exploded out of the shadows. ‘Coo-eee! Horatio!’

It took Lyle several seconds of squinting to spot a familiar red-headed figure appearing through the white fog, the grin so broad and bright it seemed to emerge from the gloom before anything else. ‘Charles,’ Lyle said, looking relieved. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Oh, I got transferred,’ the other man said. ‘You know, it’s the strangest thing, but for some reason my bosses weren’t happy about the Old Bailey being stormed on my watch by a crowd of madmen.’

‘Ah.’ Lyle’s face was unreadable.

‘And then, you’d never believe, they weren’t pleased either with the fire that broke out and the gun battle in the street outside and they recommended, after that little battle in St Paul’s Cathedral - bullet holes are hard to get out of stone, you know? - they thought that my dazzling personality might be better deployed elsewhere.’

He waited for a reply. Lyle thought about it. ‘Ah.’

Charles rolled his eyes. ‘You, Horatio Lyle, are about as useful as a herring in an iron foundry. I see you’ve still got your pets.’

Tate, Thomas and Tess avoided each other’s gaze.

‘Yes, Charles. Can you tell me what’s been happening here?’

A shrug. ‘Two murders, one witness of sorts, if you believe him, which the Inspector doesn’t, saying that he ought to be in the workhouse, not contaminating the streets; that’s the Inspector, though . . .’

‘Which Inspector?’

‘Inspector Vellum,’ said Charles, pulling a sour face.

The reaction was instantaneous.

‘I say! How rotten!’

‘The stupid potato-man!’

‘Oh,
no
.’

Even Tate offered a growl, wrinkling his nose up until the tip nearly touched the point between his eyes and his ears almost seemed to rise up on end.

‘Can’t you convince him that there’s a
clue
somewhere else?’ said Lyle weakly. In all the history of investigation, only Horatio Lyle could make ‘clue’ into a dirty word.

‘Like Chelsea,’ added Tess. ‘Or the big place over the sea to the left with the funny people an’ big hair.’ Four pairs of surprised eyes stared at her.

She glared back. ‘America!’

Lyle shook himself and said, ‘I’d like to look at the bodies, please.’

‘
Examine
them,’ added Thomas helpfully, eyes wide and bright.

‘Erm . . . yes, examine them. In an investigative manner.’ Lyle took a deep breath. ‘Yes. I think that’s what I’d like to do.’

CHAPTER 3

The cold had not only preserved the bodies, but frozen them solid. They practically clunked when the bobbies pulled the blankets off them, revealing a dark-haired, clearly foreign gentleman whose salt-seared skin looked an unhealthy shade of off-white where the effect of too many years under the sun had clashed with a short time in the cold. He wore what Lyle thought of as default, ‘yea-wise-captain’ outfit: tough clothes designed to withstand fifty-foot waves, but heavy with the kind of ornamentation that is both a flashy indicator of rank, and unlikely to blow away at embarrassing moments. In death, the man’s hands had swollen, which was probably the only thing that had prevented a fistful of shiny gold rings from having been stolen. ‘You found him in the water?’ murmured Lyle. It wasn’t really a question, and Charles’s brief, ‘Yes,’ was hardly heard.

Tess recognized this expression. It was the look that came over Lyle’s face when he was trying to calculate the forces on a steam engine piston, or on a couple of magnets in each other’s fields, or a conker on the end of a string being whirled horizontally, or sometimes even on the side of a glass full of swirling liquid. When he wore this face at supper, you would have to remind him every few minutes to keep eating, otherwise he would sink into intense and prolonged musings about the nature of a pork pie, usually ending with an announcement like, ‘I wonder if they use combustive organic oils in the upper Andes between May and October?’

You did not interrupt Mister Lyle when he looked like that. It wasn’t that he’d get angry, he just wouldn’t be able to process human speech.

She avoided looking at the bodies. True, she had seen bodies in her time, abandoned in the street for someone to clear away like litter in the morning, but she had always found the dead immensely creepy, ever since, at an early age, she had sat with other children of her profession and heard ghost stories of the workhouse gutted by fire, from which voices could sometimes be heard at night, or the orphanage where the children were never seen except as shadows in the window, or the cemetery where the lady always sang her little nursery rhyme,
Hark, hark, the dogs do bark
. Now the dead were not just the dead in her imagination, they were the once-alive, and at any moment they might open their empty eyes and stare like fishes at her accusingly, as though to say,
did you do this?

She had once, almost, considered explaining it to the bigwig, but Thomas regarded the bodies as an experimental subject; sometimes she suspected he regarded all life as a giant experiment. As for Mister Lyle, when he worked . . . something professional and shut away from common observation seemed to take over the usually childlike enthusiasm of Horatio Lyle, and something very small and angry whispered,
what a waste
.